The pain was incredible, as if the wound had become instantly infected. Carl squatted in the sand, and as he went to brace himself with his right hand he realized that it had been quite some time since he had stopped holding it in a fist. He had dropped the metal capsules. He saw only gray on gray around him, sand and pebbles and dark splotches of blood and otherwise nothing. He ran the flat of his hand over recesses and crevices. He didn’t move his feet out of fear of burying the capsules deeper in the sand. He turned his upper body to the right and the left. Cautiously at first, and then increasingly desperately, he ran the sand within his reach through his fingers, raking the surface with ten fingers, feeling the throbbing wound on his hand, and soon was barely able to make out his own forearm in the dying light. The sun had now sunk deep beneath the horizon; the needle-width sickle of the moon was following quickly behind it. Carl remained crouched in his own footsteps for a long time. Finally he braced himself with his unwounded hand and stood up, stretched out sideways and used his foot to draw a circle around himself, the radius of his body length. Then he straightened up, thoroughly brushed off his hands, feet and clothes and took a big step out of the circle. He lay down a few meters away and went to sleep.
46
The Electrification of the Salt Quarter
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy.
SHELLEY
DOES ANYONE KNOW what it is like to experience a night in the desert, alone? To someone accustomed to spending his nights in a bed, in a house, surrounded by other houses and people, it is difficult to imagine. And it is even more difficult to imagine the way the blackness and gloom tears at the spirit of someone who for days has been able to recognize no more about himself than he would about a blank piece of paper.
It’s often said that barbarism is the opposite of civilization, but a more fundamentally suitable word would be loneliness. It may have been silent and windless during the day, but the silence grew oppressive during the night. Lying on his back in the sand, the throbbing, blood-crusted hand on his chest, Carl looked at an expanse of stars the likes of which he had never seen before.
He saw the twinkle of distant suns that were nothing more than specks of dust in space, and to know that he too was lying on just such a speck of dust and the only thing separating him from eternal, weightless nothingness was a couple of grains and pebbles, a minuscule cluster of matter… the disconcerting scale entered his consciousness and mixed with his fear. Fear that someone could have followed him (or would follow him at first light), fear that he would have to flee without first being able to find the capsules, fear that an overnight sandstorm could blow everything away… and above him the insult of thousands of galaxies to which none of it mattered at all.
Satellites passed overhead in the night. Something larger, maybe an airplane. The image of eighty sleeping bodies onboard a Boeing, ten kilometers above him, heightened the painful feeling of abandonment. It got cold. Carl dug himself into the sand, and over the course of the night he buried himself deeper and deeper. He had disturbing dreams that he was unable to remember after the fact.
In the light of the morning, the circle he had drawn in the sand the night before turned out to be an oval double spiral around a rumpled center. He went around the circle but was unable to spot the capsules anywhere. He examined his sandals to make sure they hadn’t got stuck in the contours of the soles, and then he began to carefully sift the sand on the lee side of the circle. He let the sand trickle from one hand to the other, twice, three times, and then tossed it up with the wind at his back. He worked hour after hour, going through the top layer of sand by his knees, moving slightly forward, and then kept sifting. The sun rose higher and higher, and Carl squatted, sweating and thirsty, in his little trough. He became ever more despondent. By around noon he had gone through more than half of the circle and still not found a thing. Afraid he might overlook the capsules in a moment of inattention, he was now sifting each handful four and five times before tossing it onto the little mound behind him. His increased diligence left him worrying that he hadn’t been thorough enough before, so he started a second mound of the sand he had sifted five times in case he needed to sift through the less thoroughly sifted sand of the first mound.
The sun had already passed its high point when he saw a flash of metallic silver among the grains of sand, and while Carl, still sweating and distraught, was trying to calculate how many hours of work he still had ahead of him given the fact that it had taken half a day to find the first capsule, the second capsule turned up only a few handfuls later like a child thief who doesn’t dare run away when one of his little accomplices has been caught.
Carl put both capsules back into the cartridge, closed it again with the blue plastic stopper and wondered whether maybe some other spot would be safer. In his wallet? In the pocket of his blazer? Or should he just go ahead and swallow them? He took the keys, notebook and ampules of morphine out of his side pockets, stuck them in his Bermuda shorts and clipped the pen into the inside pocket of his blazer all by itself. As he was still concentrating on doing all of this he noticed a flickering figure coming toward him across the desert. A grubby white djellaba, it was a very old man.
He came directly from the direction of the barn and yelled something incomprehensible from a long distance off. This time he wasn’t holding a trident, but Carl recognized him anyway, and while Carl tried to analyze the man’s gait and the level of threat he represented, he also noticed that the sense of recognition was not mutual. Babbling loudly, the old man stomped up the dunes, calling Carl the invisible royal brigade, seemed extremely happy about his appearance and, gasping and coughing, expressed his hope that he would soon be able to hold the bodies of his two sons in his fatherly arms.
He was nearly upon Carl when he suddenly stopped short, yelled “my golden boy!” and fell to the side of the body in the sand. It took nearly ten minutes for him to realize his mistake. No, his son had never worn a light-gray suit. Only a djellaba. And where was the moped?
It was a question Carl could not answer for him, and all that he was able to learn from the old man’s hour-long barrage of words could be boiled down to three sentences: that the old man had apparently lost two sons, one of whom had been beaten and the other had gone missing. That he was hoping for the aid of a highly secret division of the police in his search for their bodies. And not to be overlooked: he was searching for his moped.
With his blazer wrapped around his head as protection against the heat, Carl continued to march westward. The burning thirst he had felt since he awoke reached an unbearable level as soon as he could make out the edges of the shanty town on the horizon. He staggered weakly between the first two corrugated-metal huts, ran into a grubby shop, bought a liter-bottle of water and downed it while still standing up. Followed by a second bottle. With the third bottle open, he wandered around behind the building and pissed while calling to the shopkeeper to ask whether there was a phone anywhere nearby. Indeed there was, in a plywood booth two streets down, where someone ran some kind of café, it was a black plastic phone.
Carl had himself connected to the Sheraton. Helen’s voice came over the line. Helen! She was not hurt, she was fine, and before she could explain to Carl how and why she escaped the blaze he screamed into the phone that he had found the “mine”… yeah, the cartridges, mines in French, were in his pocket, two tiny capsules inside a pen, he repeated, inside a pen… yes, he was sure these were the mines, and she had to come pick him up right away, in the easternmost outlying section of the Salt Quarter, the last filthy café on the main road through the huts… he was waiting for her there. The biggest street. The widest. At the easternmost point. A plywood booth with a phone. He heard his own excitement mirrored in Helen’s voi
ce, heard her tell him not to move, she’d be right there, and when he hung up the waiter was standing behind him holding up a bowl of overcooked soup as if it were a selection of the finest spices. It was on the house.
A stack of boxes facing the street served as an improvised table, and Carl sat down with his soup. He put down his blazer and closed his eyes. For the first time since the incident in the barn he felt good, felt as if he was in the clear, even though he knew that the things he still had in front of him—handing over the capsules to Adil Bassir, negotiating for the return of his family, clearing up his identity—might be the toughest of all. But the uncertainty was gone. The horrible uncertainty.
He ate and drank, brushed off his clothes, emptied the sand from his pockets and once again double-checked the contents of the inner pocket of his blazer. He washed his hands with a little of the drinking water and splashed the rest over his tortured feet, and looked down the street. Sand-colored children played with a sand-colored soccer ball between sand-colored huts… filth and ragged figures, and it occurred to him how dangerous it was to have a white, blonde woman who didn’t know the area drive here. On the other hand, Helen had already proved herself fearless on more than one occasion; and anyway, there was nothing else that could be done. He watched a dog spinning in a circle, chasing its own tail. The soccer ball landed with a clang atop a corrugated-metal roof. Then a gaggle of children with battered wooden tablets and tattered notebooks crossed the road looking like an image from a volume of children’s poetry, one with sentimental verses about bygone ages and decorated with bister sketches: golden suns, golden youth. One boy jumped on another’s back and pointed the way with a crutch. Giggling little girls transcended continents and centuries. One child hopped along behind the others with one leg and no crutch.
“Monsieur Bekurtz, où est-il?”
The book of poetry slammed shut as one of the children lurched toward Carl and noisily demanded a baksheesh. The waiter came out and whipped at the mischief-maker with a dishtowel. He called the children filthy vermin harassing his customer, scum, the god damn spawn of the god damn Salt Quarter. They made faces as they ran away, and the waiter threw a handful of pebbles at them.
Carl stared at the waiter and said: “What?”
“Yes?”
“What did you say?”
“That they should get out of here.”
“No, god damn… the god damn Salt Quarter?”
He shrugged, threw another handful of pebbles, furrowed his brow.
Carl said: “But isn’t this the Salt Quarter?”
“Sir!” said the waiter indignantly, pointing out over the shacks of his proud neighborhood, and before he was able to express his sense of insult any further Carl had already sprung to his feet and run to the telephone. He had himself connected to the Sheraton again. The waiter followed him warily, stood directly behind him and periodically held up his hand, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. The telephone operator said: “Connecting you now.”
The Empty Quarter. He was in the Empty Quarter.
“Answer!” said Carl. “Answer!”
At the beginning of the 1950s bulldozers had for the first time plowed a broad swath through the mud huts and corrugated-metal shacks of the massive slums around Targat and separated a small section in the north from the Salt Quarter. The action came to be known as the first purge. Since then the Salt Quarter and the Empty Quarter treated each other like rival football teams. They were still somehow lumped together, still spoke the same language and still lived in the same filth, but thanks to a swath between the two quarters of several kilometers in width, each came to believe theirs was a different sort of filth. Residents of the Empty Quarter developed feelings of arrogance and superiority as a result of the fact that power lines and even a telephone line were run past the area one day, which they quickly tapped into. This allowed the Empty Quarter to gain such a significant edge in civilization that it almost achieved legitimacy enough to save itself and was spared from purges two through four while its sister slum to the south sank ever more deeply into squalor.
After a few minutes of silence, the voice of the operator came on the line again and said that nobody was answering at bungalow 581d.
Carl ran back outside. Or tried to. The waiter grabbed his arm. Oh right, the bill. He pulled out a few coins, looked around for his blazer, and his blazer was gone. He stared at the waiter. The waiter turned the palms of his hands upward. Two sweaty men on the street. Above the tin roofs of the Empty Quarter hung the leaden midday heat and a fading chorus of school children’s voices. Shrieking school children, happy school children, running school children in possession of a yellow piece of women’s outerwear which sadly yielded them nothing more than a cheap pen.
Hour after hour, until late into the night, Carl walked around first the Empty Quarter and then the Salt Quarter. He offered a lot of money for the blazer. People looked at him like he was crazy, shrugged their shoulders, knew nothing. He saw no sign of Helen, whom he had sent to the wrong place. There was an easternmost extension of the Salt Quarter, but no broad street there, no huts, no telephone, nothing that would have matched his description. If Helen had tried to find him around here she would have given up long ago. Carl collapsed next to an evening garbage pile. Two dogs sniffed him, a chicken clucked at him. He pulled the ampules of morphine out of the pocket of his Bermuda shorts, held them up to look at them against a light, and couldn’t decide whether it was a sufficient dose to kill himself.
47
Chéri
According to the conception of primitive men a name is an essential part of a personality; if therefore you know the name of a person or a spirit you have acquired a certain power over its bearer.
FREUD
HE STUMBLED ALONG the harbor front. Sat down on a mooring bollard. Watched ships sailing away. My life, he thought. A boy stopped in front of him and spat a brown lump of phlegm into the air which he watched so attentively as it fell to the ground that it seemed as if he had never before studied the effects of gravity with such clarity or he thought the effects wouldn’t possibly apply in this particular case. Carl waved him over and asked whether he went to school in the area. And if so, where exactly. The boy laughed. He made angular gestures. He was deaf-mute.
No, the cartridge was lost for ever. Carl knew it. He would never find Cetrois, and besides Helen there was no other person he trusted. As he dragged himself toward the Sheraton, he considered stopping at Dr Cockcroft’s practice despite his distinct aversion.
A fruit cart was blocking his way through the narrow alley. Next to him somebody was hawking shoes. Behind him he heard a hoarse voice.
“Charly, hey.”
He turned around. At first he didn’t see anyone.
“Freeze, you idiot, you asshole! Hey!”
Half hidden by a column, a haggard woman stood leaning against a building. A ravaged face. Her shouts created an odd contrast to her motionlessness.
“What did you say?” He took a few steps back toward her. Only when he got closer did he see how young she was. Sixteen at the most. Bloody marks on her forearm, her face and neck pockmarked with boils.
“I said asshole.”
“Before that.”
“Idiot. You idiot.” She pushed herself upright off the wall.
“You said Charly.”
“I said idiot. Asshole, Charly, chéri, you piece of shit. My love. Do you have anything with you?”
She reached out for him and he shrank away from her.
From her gestures and behavior he couldn’t tell whether she was a prostitute, a crazy woman or another nymphomaniac.
“We know each other,” he said tentatively.
“You want me to blow you?”
“That was a question.”
“That was also a question.”
“Why did you call me Charly?”
She shoved him by the shoulder and then started to curse him.
A few passers-by stopped and laughe
d. The men in the café across the street straightened themselves up to be able to see better. Carl saw two policemen at the next crossing, only a stone’s throw away. He didn’t like the situation. The girl wouldn’t stop insulting him, pushing him and at the same time offering her services.
“I don’t have any money.”
She patted his pants pockets and grabbed his crotch as the crowd hooted approvingly. He jumped back. She pulled him into the next building entryway. Down a long hallway, into a small room. A mattress sat on the floor with no sheets. The memory of the honest woman in Tindirma immediately disappeared. Suddenly all the girl’s verve seemed to have abandoned her. She stood in the middle of the room, shaking.
“Do we know each other?” Carl asked again, suddenly quite sure they did know each other.
“Do you have anything with you?”
“Do you know me?”
“You want me to act all psychotic?”
“You said Charly.”
“I can call you Alphonse if you want. Or Rashid. Herr General. I’ll blow you.”
She grabbed at his pants. He held her hands.
“You have something with you!” she screeched excitedly.
“I don’t want anything from you. I just want to know whether you know me.”
She continued to rant. Her unsteady gaze, her desperate, uncomprehending manner… no, she didn’t know him. She was a deranged, drug-addicted street kid. Carl reached for the doorknob and the girl screamed: “Freeze, you fuck! You can’t leave now! If you and your piece of shit friend can’t get your shit together—”
“What friend?”
“You want to have a three-way? I’ll go get Titi.”
“What friend?”
“You disgusting pig.”
Sand Page 25
