Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  He couldn’t follow the lyrics or the music or understand the crowd’s excitement. The appallingly loud speakers did nothing but scare him and he tried to plow his way out of the mass of people. He felt Risa’s hand on his shoulder. He shook it off. Suddenly a jolt went through the room. A girl with thin brown pigtails had entered the stage or been thrown onto it. She was wearing a knee-length skirt, a tight green T-shirt and apparently no bra. Intensifying calls of “Geeshie, Geeshie!”

  Marshal Mellow had stopped singing. The girl stood at the edge of the stage and stared out over the heads of the audience. Then she lifted her T-shirt to her neck, let it down again, and left the stage. The room exploded. The bass came thick and fast. Carl saw to it that he got out.

  A man was lying on the floor of the dark corridor that led to the exit. As Carl went to step over him he grabbed Carl’s ankle with both hands.

  “Let go.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Let go of my foot.”

  “You trying to find Geeshie? Wait in the back. I’m her manager.”

  With his free foot he kicked himself out of his grasp and then walked down the hall and up two steps. He opened a door and found himself in a store room full of drinks.

  The supposed manager had in the meantime managed to stand up and blocked Carl’s way back out.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The exit. Get out of the way.”

  “You’re not looking for the exit. You’re looking for yourself.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I just want to get out of here.”

  “That’s what we all want.”

  As if he’d been struck by a gust of wind, the manager collapsed to the floor and grabbed at Carl’s leg again as he fell. Carl stepped over him like a pair of scissors and as he did so he noticed that on the shoulder and chest of the jacket the man was wearing were dark threads, as if it were a military jacket with the badges of rank ripped off.

  “You guys are really military, are you?”

  “Come here my pretty warrior. As you know, I am the man who is your father.”

  A door suddenly opened in front of Carl. That was the exit. The door slammed closed again. Carl limped toward it, pulling the manager along behind him, and felt for the door handle. There was no handle. He banged on the door.

  “What is going on? Why is it closed?”

  “It is closed because it is closed,” the manager explained solemnly.

  The boom had fallen silent and all that was audible was the muted voice of Marshal Mellow.

  “Horrible,” said Carl as he tried to free himself.

  “No truer words were ever spoken,” confirmed the manager. “The dumbest, deafest singer the world has ever known. And I am wise. I’m Geoffrey Weise. I wrote the songs. Ask me a question, you friend of truth.”

  “Why is that door closed?”

  “My hand is shaking. Shit, my hand is shaking.” The man looked at his elbow, horror-stricken.

  “Why is that door closed?”

  “The door is closed because it is closed. And now the door is open. Think about that.”

  And someone did indeed open both sides of the door at that very moment, and Carl ran out onto the street, dragging the manager behind him.

  “If you don’t take acid you don’t know who you are.”

  “I don’t know anyway. Let go.”

  “Do you take acid?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I mean. Here, lick this, chéri. Lick it, lick it.”

  With helplessly jerky motions, as if he were trying to re-enact an educational film on epileptic fits, the man fidgeted his way across the road while trying to fish something out of his bag at the same time. This finally gave Carl the chance to flee.

  “You were looking for the exit and you found it,” called Geoffrey Weise after him. “Do you realize how symbolic that is?”

  Gasping, with trembling knees, Carl stopped at the next crossroad. He looked around and wasn’t sure where to go when he once again felt someone poke his shoulder from behind. Or rather, gently massage his shoulder, not poke it.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” said the beaming Risa, holding a set of keys in Carl’s face. “Can you drive, hobby terrorist? I need someone to drive me to Tindirma. Ten dollars, or a mine with a big boom. Or both. Okay?”

  52

  Tuareg

  Soon they will die—

  Yet, showing no sign of it,

  cicadas screech

  BASHO

  CARL TURNED DOWN the offer at first, but then he remembered the yellow Mercedes that he had left in Tindirma and he reached for the keys.

  Risa dozed almost the entire way through the desert with his face against the passenger-side window. The Salt Quarter appeared in the headlights followed by the earthen road, the brick camels, the gas station, Tindirma.

  Burned-out ruins filled the streets around the commune. Families sat next to their furniture in the street and slept. Carl found the Mercedes undamaged except for some ash on the windshield, and Risa, who tried to take him to a bordello in an apparent attempt to thank him, added another ten dollars to the promised ten when they parted and said: “If you change your mind. Life is short.”

  Life is short. The sentence was nothing more than an empty cliché, but Carl couldn’t get it out of his head. He didn’t take his foot off the gas for the entire ride back. He raced. The gas station, the brick camels, the earthen road, the Salt Quarter. A kilometer or two before the souk and already within sight of the Sheraton looming above the sea of houses, he turned onto a sandy, rocky road. The Mercedes trailed a meter-high cloud of dust behind it that was lit up spectacularly by the morning sun, and by the time the cloud had settled on the little workshops, fruit stands, the souk and the steam bath of the Ville Nouvelle, a white convertible with four men inside had already parked between the bath and the war memorial. A strikingly nice car, it was an Alfa Spider with red leather seats.

  The driver of the Spider had put a paper plate of meat on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel and reached for it with both hands. He was short, slender and wiry. There was something choleric about the way he moved, even while doing something as harmless as eating. He shoved dripping pieces of meat into his mouth with both hands. Then, as the cloud of dust surrounded him, he suddenly stopped chewing—with his cheeks stuffed, looking like a cow interrupted while grazing—and spat part of his food out onto the tachometer and turned as the dust cleared and looked at the other occupants of the car.

  Next to him, in the passenger seat, sat a burly black man with his head nearly shaved, cursing and wiping sauce from his knee. In the back seat, behind the black man, was an equally stocky but light-skinned man who stuck his hand up in the air at the sight of the Mercedes. Next to the light-skinned man was a somewhat older white-haired man who seemed no less agitated but more strong-willed than the others, and he was loading a pistol. Adil Bassir.

  Difficult to say why they were parked there, what they were waiting for and what they wanted. Perhaps it was just one of those coincidences that shouldn’t trouble anyone much in a novel and that in real life contribute to the invention of the idea of fate.

  A second later the paper plate flew out of the car and with a howl of its V-6 engine the Spider headed down the earthen road, skidded sideways toward a mud-brick wall on the opposite side, and then shot off after the cloud of dust.

  The Alfa Spider had a top speed of over 200 kilometers per hour, but in the narrow alleyways, on the pothole-littered earthen road and with the thick cloud of dust in front of it, it didn’t get above sixty. It lagged further behind the Mercedes and then caught up, pedestrians ran out of the way, and when the dust cloud finally cleared in front of the Spider’s hood, among the huts on the outskirts of town, the Mercedes had disappeared.

  The driver slammed the brakes, threw the car in reverse and raced back to the previous intersection and jerked his head a
round, ninety, ninety, and two hundred and seventy degrees: four perplexed men in an Italian sports car full of food remnants.

  Two children were standing on top of a tower made of car tires. Bassir hid his weapon between his knees and yelled: “Which way did he go?”

  The children stared. They were maybe eight and nine years old. Their feet and teeth were black, their clothing tattered. Flies clung to the face of the smaller child, at the corner of his mouth, beneath his nostrils, on his eyes and forehead. The larger one was holding a mushy lump in his hand that looked like barley bread; he had been chewing it and had taken it out of his mouth. The skin of his arms shone with the purity of youth, the color of chocolate, but the hands of both children were red and raw with eczema as if they were regularly bathed in acid. The stench of a tannery wafted out from some nearby yard.

  “The yellow Mercedes!” shouted Bassir, gesturing at the vanished dust cloud. “Which way!”

  No answer.

  “Julius,” said Bassir, handing the pistol to the light-skinned man. He jumped out of the car and with a step was standing in front of the children.

  “Which way!” he asked now.

  Coal-black eyes staring into the barrel of the pistol.

  “The yellow Mercedes!”

  He held the pistol against the ear of the smaller child. The boy stammered incomprehensibly. A fly took off from the corner of his eye, alit on the pistol barrel and scurried along it excitedly.

  Julius repeated his question a second time, jerked one of the boy’s arms up and shot him in the elbow joint. The child fell over immediately, without a sound, his legs writhing around on the ground. The other boy stood there with his mouth open.

  “Which way?”

  The larger boy gulped but offered nothing more of an answer.

  “I don’t think they understand you,” said the black man from the passenger seat. “Fucking Tuaregs.”

  He yelled a question at the boy in Tamajaq. He immediately raised his trembling arm and pointed down a side street behind the men. There were rows and rows of huts along it, and beyond the last one the boxy shape of a parked Mercedes 280 SE gleamed in the sunlight.

  53

  The Five Columns

  If a hare, a goat or another animal passes before a praying person the prayer remains valid. The jurists are in agreement that only three entities annul a prayer: a grown woman, a black dog and a donkey.

  ABDUL-AZIZ IBN BAZ

  CARL, WHO HADN’T EATEN a proper meal in an eternity, saw the little souk off to his right, felt in his pocket for his money and parked the car. He had only made it a few meters into the rows of merchants and was standing in front of a display of fresh bread when he heard screams behind him. A shot rang out. Above the heads of the shoppers he saw the nearly shaved head of a huge black man making his way toward him using his arms like a freestyle swimmer to clear the way. Behind him two more men shoving their way through the crowds. The smaller of the two was holding up an Uzi and the man with white hair was smiling. Carl knew immediately who they were and didn’t need to think long about what they wanted from him. The ultimatum had expired. He fled into a cluster of people in the hope that they wouldn’t shoot at him. And in fact they did not shoot, but the people all ran off screaming. Everyone ran into buildings. For a second Carl was alone on the street with his pursuers. He sprinted into a narrow street and realized too late that it was a cul-de-sac. A door closed in his face. At the exact same time a second shot rang out.

  Carl threw himself to the ground. Clay exploded out of a wall directly in front of him and sprayed in his face. A burst of machine-gun fire went over him. He threw his arms over his head and looked past his armpit at the men following him.

  A snapshot: from a horizontal position in the street. His own body sloping away from his armpits. A lost shoe was in the picture, not his own. At the entrance to the cul-de-sac the body of the smaller man hung in the air, his bent knee nearly touching the ground, the weightless Uzi above hands thrown high in the air just like the famous photo from the Spanish Civil War. Next to him Adil Bassir colliding with the nearby wall with an awkward swing like a marionette. The right side of his face displayed a mix of relaxation and surprise, the left side was being blown away in the form of mincemeat. The black man was not in view. The pursuer who had got closest to Carl, Julius, was lying two meters away in the sand, a lifeless arm stretched out toward Carl’s foot. A cherry-red bubble of blood coming from his mouth.

  Despite the freeze-frame of the images, the soundtrack continued incongruously on: bursts of machine-gun fire, shots from a small-caliber handgun, screams. A nine-millimeter. American accents. Two uniformed personnel grabbed Carl and dragged him to a green Jeep Wagoneer. Or he ran along behind them, he was barely conscious of what was happening. He came to again while staring at the waffle pattern of a rubber mat at his feet. The rubber mat was between the driver’s seat and the back seat of the jeep. On the waffle pattern: sand, balls of paper, hair and a chewed piece of gum. And his own feet.

  Sand and paper balls hopped and jumped in the rhythm of the jeep. A hand on the back of his neck kept him from lifting his head. The hand belonged to one of the uniformed men, one with a brownish, nearly olive complexion and built like an armoire. He spoke two sentences of Arabic to Carl, high Arabic with a light Syrian accent. The other uniformed man, who had spoken in American English, sat in the front passenger seat and seemed to be in command. Four stars on his epaulets: were these guys really military? Wasn’t one of them a member of Marshal Mellow’s band? The bassist?

  The driver was the only one Carl couldn’t see. He was only able to see between the seats that he wasn’t wearing a uniform but rather striped trousers. A girlishly small gloved hand held the gear shifter. A hairless wrist… in his feeble state of mind Carl thought for a second it might be Helen, coming to his rescue.

  The man in the passenger seat yelled. The Syrian pushed Carl’s head down more, the jeep leaned into the turns.

  “Everything okay?”

  “You got him?”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “You got him?”

  “I’ve got him.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anyone following us?”

  “All dead.”

  “I said: anyone following us?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I got them all.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Who, me?” asked Carl.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Turn right up here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You’ll come to a bridge. Take another right after the bridge.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Slow down.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Carl tried to lift his head. The Syrian pressed his hand into his neck even harder and said something about security. Carl complained even though it wasn’t clear to him why he was the only one hunched over. He could see that the driver and the man in the passenger seat were sitting upright, and the Syrian, too, who was half again as tall as Carl, wasn’t taking cover. Apparently his life was more important than theirs.

  Only now, several minutes after his rescue, did he feel the tingly process of disintegration in his bones and the way his deadly fear had turned his body to jelly. Sobbing hysterically, he thanked his rescuers in a tone that seemed miserable even to him. They didn’t react.

  “Left there?”

  “Yeah, I’d say that’s the left we want.”

  “The wide street there?”

  “That’s the wrong one, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Ninety per cent.”

  “Then I’m turning left.”

  “There’s the synagogue.”

  “That’s a different synagogue.”

  “What if I just take a right?”

  “No.”

  “You say no?
”

  “I agree.”

  “You agree?”

  “Do you want to tell me who you are?”

  “Calm down.” That came from the front seat.

  When Carl tried to lift his head again the Syrian twisted one of his arms behind his back. He tried to defend himself and got a punch in the ribs, then he felt his wrists being handcuffed behind his back.

  “Is he making trouble?”

  “Wait a second.”

  “You got it?”

  “Of course I got it.”

  “If he starts making trouble the syringe is in the back.”

  “It broke earlier. But it doesn’t matter, he’s not causing any trouble.”

  “He can’t scream.”

  “He’s not screaming.”

  “If he screams, put something in his mouth.”

  “What the hell?” bellowed Carl.

  The Syrian pressed a balled-up handkerchief into his face and tried to stuff it into his mouth. Carl turned his head back and forth. “I’m not saying anything,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Quiet down, quiet down,” murmured the driver in a voice that seemed vaguely familiar to Carl.