Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  Outside, a floor below, Carl saw a group of men running through the street. A straggler trailed along behind them, limping. Carl put the end of the cartridge in his mouth and watched them go by. A distant scream could be heard and then he suddenly screamed himself… a string of fine droplets of blood landed on the window.

  He had ripped the plug out of the end of the cartridge with his teeth and hurt his lip in the process. The cartridge fell to the floor. He hopped around on one leg in pain. Then he picked up the cartridge, held it up to his eyes and tried to peer into the dark, open end. He turned the open end downward and shook it. Two long metal capsules with rounded edges fell into his hand. The capsules looked exactly the same. They were perfectly cylindrical, dull silver, and even at first glance appeared so different from the other parts of the pen that Carl didn’t doubt for a second what he had found. Around the middle of each cylinder ran an inconspicuous seam. He washed the blood from his lip in the bathroom, then he got dressed and ran out.

  44

  La Chasse à L’Ouz

  Not a single progressive idea has begun with a mass base, otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea.

  TROTSKY

  THE FIRST THING he saw out on the street was a young man with a sickle over his shoulder, followed by others. There were more and more of them. Carl tried to make his way toward the commune but soon it was impossible to move up the street. For no discernible reason, groups of people suddenly drew together and broke apart again. Young men blocked the street, ran around, linked arms with each other. At first there was no discernible goal, but distant calls soon drew the crowd in a certain direction. Carl saw picks, shovels and axes. Most of the stream of people was made up of young men the same age as him. But there were also a few old men, and little children with bows and arrows ran around the edges and got squeezed up against the buildings. Not a single woman on the street. Carl stood still, tried to take a few steps against the stream but was pushed, jostled and carried along. The blazer where he had stashed the pen he held firmly against his arm. Pushing his way to the side of the street, he tried to turn into side alleys, but streams of people were coming out of all the side streets as well.

  Above him a window opened and a toothless old man yelled at the men. Some immediately went toward the window, spitting, jumping up and trying to hit him with fists and sticks, before a woman managed to yank it closed.

  The stream along the main road met up with other streams from various side streets and spilled out into the souk. There any sense of direction was lost. The center of activity seemed to have been reached and also to be empty. People wandered around in circles. Formations that had held on the way there fell apart. There was a strange absence of enthusiasm from it all, and Carl found himself reminded of a show he and Helen had watched on TV the night before. An animal show. A glittering, silvery school of fish forms and quickly shifts, and with these shifts communicates second by second the onset of a shark attack. All the faces around him were blank with anticipation.

  Carried along, Carl wondered where all the children and adolescents were; he found them on the roofs around the souk, where they were standing with bows and arrows. He himself gave up trying to go against the flow. Just don’t stand out.

  The restlessness became ever more palpable, and suddenly it seemed as if a standstill had been reached that slowly worked its way backwards through the crowd. A brief hold-up, then a sharp cry, and the crowd shot out of the center of the souk, crashing like a wave into walls and buildings and washing into the surrounding side streets. Carl found himself carried up a set of stairs in the tallest building around the souk, blocked in by other bodies.

  From his raised position he looked out into the middle of the nearly empty souk. A couple of clubs and a lonely sandal lay abandoned there, and a slim teen with a contorted leg and eyes wide open, the loneliest person in the world. Bracing himself on his elbows, he crawled along the ground and kept looking around in panic—until his gaze stopped at a side street. A murmur went through the crowd. Something popped out from between the buildings, something that looked like a giant, dark snout with trembling whiskers.

  “Ouz! Ouz! Ouz! Ouz!”

  The snout floated a few centimeters forward. Thick, bushy fur, a hanging lower jaw, two gigantic tusks in its mouth. Short, thick legs dangled from the sides of the beast. It bore no resemblance to anything Carl had ever seen before. The triangular head would have looked like a marten’s except for the fact that the marten was as big as a truck. Scattered screams—and with blood-red, beady eyes the beast swung in Carl’s direction. It seemed to fix on him for half a second. Then, accompanied by the roar of the crowd, it shot across the souk and into a side street on the far side. Men holding up axes followed immediately after it. A few seconds later the beast re-emerged from another side street, ran across the souk again and began to run around in frenzied circles with an ever-larger crowd of people following it. Horror had given way to an urge for action, the urge for action turning into daring and bloodlust. Behind the field of people stumbled the old men, the slow ones, a child on crutches and a few excited unarmed people. Whenever the beast made unexpected moves they screeched excitedly, and when the crowd surged backwards a few were caught beneath and trampled.

  A bare-chested man stood directly in its path and was tossed aside by the tusks. Others wounded the flanks of the monster and slumped away, celebrating, accompanied by a rain of arrows. After just two trips across the souk, the animal’s pelt was peppered with barbs. The archers stopped waiting for the target to approach and instead took long shots when it was out of range. The arrows clattered to the ground, pattered against building walls, or stuck in the backs of foolhardy attackers. The people who had been trampled tried to crawl away. Nobody helped them.

  The ouz was finally dispatched not far from the stairs where Carl was standing. One wave of attack after another broke over the barely still-twitching lump of fur; even the weakest and smallest took part. The giant cadaver fell over sideways and stuck a foreleg in the air like a chimney. A hind leg lay broken and in the beast’s dented, ripped-open flanks wooden lathing and beams were visible. But the crowd continued to beat on the mechanical parts, and as the hindquarters caught fire Carl spotted four men in ritual vestments fleeing from the slit-open belly of the beast. Robbed of their original goal, the angry crowd threw itself against the priests and pummeled them until they were able to throw off their vestments in the jostling mob and get away.

  Carl stood on the stairs as if paralyzed, clenching his blazer. The men around him didn’t move, and he was able to watch for several minutes as the remains of the ouz moved around in the middle of the crowd. Like a giant molecule being pounded by tiny, invisible particles, it moved across the square, flaming. Kicks and shoves moved it along, a teen jumped onto its back and his shirt immediately caught fire. At first it seemed as if the flaming monster was simply rolling around by chance, here and there, but the increasingly loud and strident screams eventually made clear that a goal had been found. With clubs, stakes and kicks the men pushed the fireball into a side street and up to a wooden gate.

  Carl couldn’t see what was happening beyond, but through the billows of smoke he thought he saw a few Europeans trying to push back the rolling ball of fire with ridiculous kung fu moves. Which obviously did nothing. The ouz was shoved up against the gate, which immediately broke out in flames. Soon stacks of wood and garbage in the inner courtyard of the commune had also caught fire.

  Two women attempted to put out the flames with a very green, very silly-looking garden hose. Another one in jeans and a batik shirt shoved bags, carpets and heavy boxes into a large Land Rover. Helen was nowhere to be seen. The flames were lapping at the main building in no time. The Land Rover took a running start in order to break through the inferno but got stuck in all the debris. A triumphant cry went up again and only died down when the fire jumped to other nearby buildings. Two streets of houses were completely burned down.

  With tr
embling knees, Carl made his way down the stairs during all of this. Everything seemed to move toward the fire, and he pushed his way sideways past the crowd and into a small side street. There to his relief he could see that a little blue Honda was not among the small number of cars still parked in front of the commune.

  But his relief was short-lived. Because as he looked down he realized his blazer was gone. The arm on which he had been holding it was still cocked, but it was empty. He first ran back to the stairs, then across the souk. A small boy armed with two spears was carrying something bright yellow in the crook of his arm. Carl caught him right in front of the fountain. The boy, not even ten years old, clasped his prize, screaming, scratching and biting, punched Carl in the stomach and tried to escape. Carl shoved him up against the wall of a building. He ripped the blazer out of his hands and searched the pockets for the pen. The pen wasn’t there. Not in the right pocket, not in the left. On all fours the boy tried to crawl away. Carl knocked him over with a kick to his side. He put a foot on the boy’s throat while he continued to search the interior pockets of the jacket, then the side pockets again. A group of men with clubs began to assemble around them. “He stole something of mine! The filthy little brat robbed me!” yelled Carl as his foot continued to hold down the wriggling boy. Suddenly his finger felt the pen in the right pocket that he had already looked through three times. At that same moment something hit him on the shoulder. Carl reeled, pushed the crowd aside and rushed off with the blazer pressed to his chest.

  He heard yelling and screaming behind him, and among the voices was one that sounded very different from the rest. Shrill and questioning. Turning around, Carl recognized a familiar face… but he wasn’t sure. His pursuer seemed equally unsure. And in this uncertainty they recognized each other. It was one of the four men in the white djellabas that Carl had seen on the day he awoke in the barn. The man had a nondescript face, was again wearing a white djellaba and was clearing his way through the mob with both arms. And he didn’t seem to be alone. Behind him the fat man was also pushing his way through the crowd. Behind him the short one.

  45

  Moon and Stars

  Enthroned on high in heaven he looks down upon us

  And pitifully points humankind the way;

  And his starry writing upon the heavenly firmament

  Declares joy in this world and adverse destiny;

  But humankind, world weary and aggrieved of death,

  They don’t ask about such writing, they read it not.

  PIERRE DE RONSARD

  CARL’S FIRST THOUGHT was to make for the Mercedes. But even if he managed to reach the car, unlock it and start the engine, he wouldn’t be able to move a meter in the clogged streets. He ran without thinking, and when an alleyway appeared on his left that opened onto the desert, he sprinted down it.

  Luckily for him, his pursuers turned out to be poor runners. It seemed he had lost them by the second or third dune.

  Carl ran and the hot sand that pressed in between the straps of his sandals burned his toes. The memory of his last flight through the desert welled up in him and filled him with panic. Should he keep running? Take a roundabout route back to the car? Bury himself again?

  No, he didn’t want to return to the oasis at any price. The situation there was too unclear. Maybe later. The sun was only two hand-widths above the horizon, soon it would be dark, then he’d be safe in the desert. It was twenty or thirty kilometers to Targat. He could make it.

  Out of breath and with bad cramps in his side, he stopped. He looked around. Silence. The first star appeared and he thought of Helen. He hoped, no, he was sure, that she had left the commune before the situation escalated there. She could have found his note telling of his discovery of his car, and she was smart and pragmatic enough to save her own skin, knowing he had done the same. With every step he stomped more heavily in the sand. His brain kept conjuring up dreamlike images, suddenly he saw himself in a happy future. He had a blonde, unbelievably attractive American wife, two or three hazy children and an interesting career. Neighbors and friends held him in high regard, he was a valuable member of society, and then his neighbor was bitten by a poisonous snake. Carl saved his life by tying off his arm and sucking the venom out. Then four men in djellabas dropped out of a helicopter, shot him and raped Helen.

  What made a brain like his come up with daydreams like that? But he was unable to pursue the question any further. He was exhausted from walking and let his thoughts keep running in the same grim circle.

  Since Dr Cockcroft had first insinuated—even if only ironically—that Helen could be his wife or lover just having a laugh, Carl had been unable to give up the hope that sooner or later everything would resolve itself in a quick, witty dialogue. When the various plot strands reached their most convoluted, Verdi arias would ring out and champagne corks would pop. Helen would reveal some plausible reason for her game of cat and mouse, and his memories would come out from behind heavy curtains like guests at a surprise party.

  He nearly tripped on the corpse. Or the part that was sticking out of the sand. A foot without a shoe, a black sock, a light-gray pant leg. Carl took a horrified step back and looked over at the slope from which he had peered out into the pale-gray hours before. Then he looked to the other side. Sure enough, there on the horizon the gable of the barn was visible.

  Holding his breath, he dug out the body and turned it over with two kicks. A man of indeterminate age, with open, sand-blind eyes on his face. The cause of death was clearly a thin wire cutting through his blood-encrusted throat. Both ends of the wire were wrapped around broken halves of a pencil. An Adolphe Menjou-style mustache sat like a dusty butterfly on the rotten flower that was his blue-tinted face.

  It could only be Cetrois! So the four men had caught him. While Carl was acrobatically scaling his way down the ladder from the attic. But where was the moped?

  Carl walked around the dune in a small circle, then in a larger one, and a larger one still. No moped to be seen. Instead, the parallel tire tracks of a car, leading toward the barn. He crouched down beside the body. Perhaps this was my friend, he thought. Perhaps my enemy. He took a handful of sand and let it trickle into the mouth of the dead man.

  Then he searched the pockets of the pale-gray suit, but someone seemed to have been there before him. No keys, no wallet, no personal items. Only a used piece of gum wrapped in foil and, in the right pants pocket, a few shreds of reddish paper. The shreds had been typed on. Carl tried unsuccessfully for a few minutes to assemble them like a puzzle in the palm of his hand, then put them in his own pocket. Once again he went through the pockets thoroughly, and he found a few more scraps of paper and took those, too.

  He stayed crouched next to the body, looked from time to time at the horizon and rocked back and forth on his knees like a little child. Then he felt in his pocket for the pen, took it apart and pulled the blue plastic plug out again with his teeth. He let the two metal capsules drop into his hand. It seemed to him as if they could be screwed apart at the seam. But not without a tool. He could barely grip the little cylinders with four fingers, and as he was fiddling with them he thought he saw motion in the desert out of the corner of his eye. He stared at the orange-colored edge of a dune behind which the sun was setting. But everything was calm. He stood up carefully, turned around slowly 360 degrees, and again saw the shadow. Now the orange light was broken in one spot, and at the crest of the dune stood an animal about the size of a marten. It didn’t move.

  “Aha?” said Carl softly, moving toward it. The animal took a cautious step to the side. Carl thought he saw something transparent on its head. Very slowly he advanced a few steps toward it, kneeled down, stretched out his hand and made a quiet clicking sound that he thought was reassuring. With its head cocked slightly to the side, the ouz trotted up to him. It had two sharp incisors that protruded over its lower lip. In this miniature form it didn’t seem at all threatening. As he got closer, the thing on its head turned out to be a
crumply piece of paper through which the last rays of the sun were shining. Carl saw letters on the paper. He carefully put a hand under the animal’s belly and lifted it up. It didn’t move, it just sniffed and made little peeping sounds. “Shhh,” said Carl. “Shhh.”

  The strip of paper had been strapped to the animal’s head with a rubber band, and Carl turned the ouz around so he could read what was there: A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake… he didn’t get any further. With a screech he flung the animal to the ground; it had bitten him. The exact imprint of its two rows of teeth were visible on his wrist, and blood seeped from the wound. It had already run down to his elbow and dripped in the sand. The animal trotted off in no hurry, turned around to look at him from the top of the next dune and disappeared into the twilight.