Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  There was little going on there at that hour. A shroud of mist hid the sun. Helen and Carl sat down on a large towel and talked as Michelle lay down on her stomach a little way away and immersed herself in the colorful stories. There was something in her bearing that seemed to be trying to pre-emptively head off any criticism of the quality of her reading materials. After she’d flipped through a few pages she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Helen had got up and headed back up to the bungalow. Carl stayed behind, lost in thought, and barely acknowledged Michelle’s friendly gaze. Michelle tried to focus on her reading again. The sand slowly filled with other people. Helen returned after about a quarter of an hour with a piece of paper in her hand and sat down right next to Carl.

  “Listen up. There’s no Cetrois,” she said in a muted voice. Carl took the note out of her hand and looked at it.

  “There’s nothing. There’s nobody with that name. The name doesn’t exist. I called France, America, I called London, friends in Spain and Canada, I asked people to look in their phonebooks. Not a single match. No Cetrois. No Cetroix, no Sitrois, no Setrois… nothing.”

  Carl squinted at the list of crossed-out place names: Paris, London, Seville, Marseilles, New York, Montreal. Beneath them were a dozen different spellings of the name, likewise crossed out.

  “You have friends everywhere,” he mumbled, impressed.

  What he found most impressive was the fact that someone could call all those places from the little holiday bungalow and how quickly Helen had managed to get all the research done. Though something about the list still bothered him, seemed mistaken. But what was it? Was it the alternative spellings of the name? Or Helen’s handwriting, using all capital letters except for the letter n? He thought for a long time about what it was, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. (And when he hit upon it three days later, it was already too late.)

  While Helen stretched out in the sun again with a sigh, putting an arm across her eyes to block the sunlight, and talked about francophone Canada and her friend in Paris, Michelle studied the backgrounds of the images in her book with a look of devotion on her face. She’d probably read the thing twenty times before, but there were always new, wonderful details to be found in the backgrounds. Now and then she took a shy glance at the other two, and when their conversation had ebbed and Carl seemingly coincidentally caught her eye, she offered him one of her books. Carl opened it absent-mindedly. It was called Asterix and the Big Fight.

  On the first page was a map of France with a Roman flag staked in the ground and a large magnifying glass above Brittany; beneath that, a Gallic village surrounded by four Roman camps. It seemed familiar to Carl. Likewise the personal descriptions on the next page seemed familiar.

  While he tried to make sense of the sometimes oval, sometimes round speech bubbles, he heard two women’s voices behind him, one familiar and one unfamiliar. He didn’t turn around. He saw that Helen had her face pressed into her towel and her arms wrapped around her head as if she were trying to block her ears.

  The unknown voice spoke in a strong German accent about Duisburg, coal-mining and culture; the voice he recognized, which belonged to Michelle, chipped in adjectives.

  The first panels showed the contrast between the Gauls, adapted to Roman civilization and somewhat ridiculous, on the one hand; and on the other, the traditional, boar-hunting good guys. A druid lost his power to brew magic potion along with his memory after a blow to the head; a second druid named Amnesix, who ran a sort of psychology practice in the forest and who tried to blame his counterpart’s condition on a stone monolith, also lost his memory.

  “Reality is a mirror,” said Michelle’s voice, “through which you reach your hand.”

  Both druids suddenly knew nothing and nobody. People put kettles and herbs in front of them in the hope that they’d be able to unconsciously remember their magic formulas, but all the potions they brewed produced nothing but facial discoloring and small explosions and caused a Roman legionnaire who served as a guinea pig to float away like a helium balloon. A fat Gaul thought he could dispatch the memory loss with a second blow to the head with a monolith; a light-bulb went on above his head. A little Gaul spoke three angry exclamation marks.

  “… Akasha was the only one. But my four best friends, they’re in a better world now, I’m positive of that. When you’ve lived in the desert for a long time, your perspective changes.”

  In the end the surprising cure, a sickly green drink brewed beneath bubbling captions which caused hair to stand on end and eyes to redden and steam to shoot from the druids’ ears, was recognizable even to uninitiated readers. The final panel was a party, a bonfire and a gagged troubadour, and even this seemed vaguely familiar to Carl. He was baffled. But the thing that baffled him the most was the druid Amnesix’s secretary. Very slim, very pretty and very blonde, she seemed to Carl the spitting image of Helen. He took a quick glance at the original, then looked from Helen over to Michelle, and there was another person as well. A pale, female person.

  With a sociability she had likewise inherited from her Italian grandmother, Michelle had a few minutes before she made the acquaintance of a German tourist who quickly proved to be surprisingly wise. The German woman was wearing a green and yellow striped bathing suit, spoke broken English and worked as something she described as “a woman for everything”. Michelle showed her the tarot cards, she talked about growing crops and the weather, and the German complained about politics. Not that she had any time for the Israelis, but what had happened in Munich, it was awful! Of course one could understand the Palestinians’ despair, could understand why they attacked the Jews abroad, after all, what other chance did they have to get the attention of the global public? Which is why the killings were a consequence of international politics, of the attitude of the community of nations—but still! There were innocent people among the victims. Was there anything more cynical than “the games must go on”? The two women shed a few tears. A breeze kicked up. Michelle couldn’t remember the last time she’d had such a good conversation. It felt pleasant to lean on the shoulder of the German, who smelled a bit of mayonnaise, to surrender her feelings to her while looking out at the ocean beyond which lay America, which, Michelle had just learned, was also run by Jews. At least economically speaking. This German knew all sorts of things. With a finger placed pensively on her lower lip, Michelle suggested asking the tarot cards about the Palestinian conflict.

  She spoke in a low voice, but the people on the other towel weren’t paying attention to the two women anyway. Carl had just asked Helen some question, Helen had answered excitedly, and they were already deeply engaged in another mindless conversation about the man named Cetrois. Cetrois here, Cetrois there.

  “What is it with you two and this Cetrois?” called Michelle.

  She began to explain the placement system and the extension of the Celtic cross to the German, who incidentally was named Jutta. She touched on the ancient Egyptian origins of the cards, the Major and Minor Arcana, the principle and its inverse, and all along she intermittently repeated her question.

  “Do you want a piece of chocolate?” Helen answered.

  Without even dignifying her childhood friend with so much as a glance, she laid the Hierophant on the one. Why did Helen always have to make it so obvious how little she thought of her spiritual powers? Not to mention the fact that Helen knew damn well that Michelle never ate chocolate: it went straight to her thighs.

  “I’m just asking! Cetrois here, Cetrois there.”

  “There is no Cetrois,” said Helen angrily.

  The waves whooshed on the sand and the seagulls screeched above their heads. The magnificence of the natural surroundings would have calmed and relaxed anyone else. But not Helen.

  “Of course there’s Cetrois,” said Michelle. She held up the next card solemnly and then turned it over. The Magician on two. The Hierophant as the starting point and the Magician in the ascendancy was never easy for Michelle to interpret. Yo
u deceived yourself if you mistook religiosity for religion here. “I know him,” she mumbled, laying Temperance in the third position. Temperance next to the Magician, it didn’t make any sense at all. She’d have to wait. Often the connections became clear only with context. Next came the Hermit, the Star, the Chariot… and finally Michelle lifted her head in the awful silence surrounding her.

  Helen and Carl had jumped up and were staring at her. She hadn’t expected so much attention. She calmly laid out the rest of the cards. The Wheel of Fortune, the Lovers, the Emperor…

  “What?” yelled Helen.

  “You know him?” yelled Carl.

  What kind of tone was that? She let a few seconds elapse before she looked up again.

  “You know him?” Helen yelled.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, shrugging her shoulders at Jutta, and Jutta nodded knowingly. “But nobody asked me.”

  She put on a pouty face and contemplated with a friendly, self-possessed look the friendly, self-possessed Emperor on the ten. Would the Emperor bring peace to Palestine? That was the question. The cards seemed to suggest an interpretation, but unfortunately for only half a second. Then Michelle was yanked around by her shoulder. Helen. Next to Carl. Screaming. Up to this point it had been a triumph. But now it was suddenly unpleasant. Michelle would like to have refused to answer or at least dragged her feet about answering the questions that had been so extremely impolitely posed, but if her years in the commune had taught her one thing it was that being yanked by the shoulder represented the end of friendly communication. What was that great saying? The cleverer person gives in!

  “The more clever person gives in,” said Michelle. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and began somewhat fearfully because of Helen, who was standing over her, to report that she knew this Cetrois, yes, of course she knew him, and why wouldn’t she? Okay, not directly, but… how did she know him? Yeah, how indeed, as if she couldn’t figure it out herself. It was obvious given the fact that she hadn’t spent time in the last few years in any other location than the commune, and it was there… no! Not a member of the commune, good god, he wasn’t a member of the commune… and what was the meaning of all this? Could they please stop shaking her by the shoulder and just let her talk? She was in the process of explaining, and it wasn’t as if a second or two mattered. She could only talk if they stopped badgering her, that’s the way she was, Michelle, she was how she was, and if they didn’t calm down, then it wasn’t going to work…

  Helen slapped her in the face. It was the first time in her life she had been smacked like that, and it remained unclear as to whether it had a therapeutic effect or not. If one takes an aspirin and the headache subsides, one never knows what really caused the cure. And what emerged in less than a few seconds was that Michelle didn’t know who this Cetrois was. She had neither seen him nor spoken to him… no, not personally. He had visited the commune shortly after the massacre. On behalf of an insurance company. He was apparently an insurance agent.

  “At first we thought he was a journalist, then a detective or something like that. And then perhaps an insurance representative. Agent. Though that’s what the others said, I was asleep at the time. Now leave me alone.”

  They didn’t leave her alone.

  “What insurance company?”

  Michelle fidgeted, coughed and looked around. All these probing questions. Once again it wasn’t enough just to know something. Everything always had to be precise and substantiated, the typical Western affliction. And she didn’t know exactly anyway.

  “I only know what the others told me,” she explained, emphasizing her words with dramatic gestures. Because it had been a dramatic series of events. “I don’t have anything to do with it! It was a few days after the horrible attack. The police had searched through everything, for hours, and then this man showed up. Because Ed Fowler… Ed, Eddie, you met him, he had some sort of insurance policy from that English company—”

  “Life insurance? Theft?”

  “Yes… no. Could have been. He had some sort of insurance policy, don’t ask me what it was. I’ve never paid attention to material things, and Ed himself didn’t pay attention to such things either. It was his family, they took out the policy. He’s from a filthy-rich family, and they must have wanted, they apparently took out a policy on him, how should I know what kind?” Michelle paused briefly, though only ever so briefly. “In any event, it was in all the papers, the rattan suitcase and the money. The golden suitcase full of cash. Everyone saw it, thousands of people were standing in front of the place and saw that dirty Amadou with the suitcase… and you know how the Arabs are. Gold and jewelry! You wouldn’t kill four people for nothing. But it was just a rattan suitcase. Mine, by the way. Had to make them in the fourth grade, yellow with red stars on it. The stars fell off though. And somebody had filled it with paper money. East German. Which wasn’t worth anything.”

  “How much was it worth?”

  “A couple of dollars is what Ed said.”

  “But nobody knew that?”

  “Yes, they did. The police—at first we told them everything. In the initial shock. And then Ed realized… they became dollars later on. It’d been dollars in the case. And valuables. Gold.”

  “And then you tried to scam the insurance company. Is it possible that it was Lloyd’s?”

  “I don’t know if it was Lloyd’s. I had nothing to do with it! I shouldn’t even have told you about it.” Michelle lined the cards up on the patterned bath towel in front of her. It suddenly looked grim for the future of Palestine. She did not want to continue the conversation.

  “But you didn’t see him?”

  “No.”

  “And how do you know he was named Cetrois?”

  “Because the others told me, for god’s sake! The ones who talked to him. They said that was his name.”

  “And he showed up there, knocked on the door and introduced himself as insurance agent Cetrois.”

  “Yeah… no… no, not as an insurance agent. But that’s what we figured out, we’re not idiots! I mean, he introduced himself as… I don’t know exactly, a journalist or something, I don’t remember any more. But it was clear that he was no journalist. That he was there about the money. Because he kept asking about it. Money, money, money! Money here, money there, money everywhere! And now you tell me why you’re interested in him.” Michelle fought back tears and Jutta, who had sat by sympathetically quiet the whole time, took her hand.

  39

  No Body, No Murder

  I mean, of course I’ll move my camera. But only if I see a reason to.

  CRONENBERG

  A LARGE BUILDING and two small ones, in the middle of the desert. Canisades followed tire tracks that split off from the road and led to the buildings. Laundry had been laid out to dry on the roof of one of the small huts. The giant barn was falling apart, sand dunes were creeping up the walls. A garbage pile had attracted two birds. Presumably the estate had stood on arable land twenty or thirty years ago, irrigated either from the oasis or by means of a spring right here that had since dried up. There could be only two reasons for the fact that someone still lived here. Either the owner was crazy, or smugglers were using the old barn for storage. Canisades parked his car. An old fellah immediately staggered over toward him. Based on physiognomy alone, the “crazy” hypothesis was gaining in plausibility. Half blind, squinting badly, one eye glazed over, dull white.

  “Misery! Misery!” he began to yell. “Are you the police? No amount of money in the world can make up for it. My sons! Thousands of dollars, thousands and thousands, my noble sons, light of my life, the sun in my winter years! Cradled in my arms, both of them, the young princes. I beg you, no amount of money on earth.”

  Canisades, who had no intention of trying to make up for anything in the world with money, took a step back.

  “Mohammed Bennouna? This is your property?”

  The man nodded dramatically. “Dead and gone! Pain in my earn
est heart, I do not lie! Once a paradisiacal garden, now a filthy desert. An infidel… fallen from above… this is how he slayed them, like this! With both hands.” He swung an imaginary pulley block above his head. “May he rot in the depths of hell… I will not curse. The pain. Allah has challenged me with the toughest test, which is just. But my golden boy, my silver boy, murdered, defiled, gone…”

  “Where are the bodies?”

  “Can one live with these thoughts? That is what I ask myself. For the broken skulls of my sons, how could it… under no circumstances. The moped is gone, my sons are gone, the pillars of strength in my old age… invaluable! And that doesn’t even include the pain in my soul.” The fellah fell to his knees in front of Canisades and wrapped his arms around his legs. Despite the scent of alcohol coming off him, it couldn’t have been the only explanation. Canisades first tried to step out of his grasp, then cursed at him. The old man crawled after him on all fours.

  “Show me the bodies. You reported two dead. And stop drooling on my shoes.”

  The fellah kept jabbering and it was only when Canisades took out his car keys and threatened to drive back to Targat that he collected himself. Still piteous, but relatively coherently and with grand gestures, he took Canisades around and reported what had happened; or at least what he believed had happened. Apparently he had had two sons. The older was twenty-one (light of my life, the sun in my winter years, etc.) and had been hit with a heavy object (the old man suggested a pulley block); the younger was sixteen, had run off into the desert and been killed there. On the same day.

  It remained unclear how the old man had arrived at this explanation, since he had not seen the murders, and, as it soon emerged, there were no bodies or any signs of the crimes. And the supposed perpetrator, whom the old man persisted in calling an infidel fallen from above, seemed vague and hazy. On the one hand the fellah claimed to have seen him (and even to have wrestled with him mano-a-mano), on the other hand he couldn’t give any further details about his person except that he was an “infidel” and had “fallen from above”. It took a while before Canisades realized the entire episode had taken place not outside beneath the open sky but inside the barn, where the man hadn’t fallen from above but rather jumped down from someplace; the proof that he was an infidel apparently rested in the very fact that he was able to commit such a crime. But that was basically it as far as the facts were concerned. Nothing more could be culled from the tirade by the physically and mentally reeling fellah.