Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  She looked at the clock, called to the waiter and paid. Then she went to her locker and glanced over her shoulder at passers-by. Inconspicuously she took two heavy objects from her travel bag and shoved them, still hidden within the locker, into a plastic bag. She left the airport with the plastic bag, crossed the street and stopped in front of the neon sign she had seen. It was a car rental office.

  The cheapest car was a sand-colored Renault 4 with a dashboard gearshift. Helen choked the engine a few times before she left the thick traffic and headed off on the dirt road to Tindirma. She stepped all the way down on the gas. The view of the two kissing camels affected her like looking at a dusty box of childhood memories.

  What exactly she intended to do—if she intended anything at all—she didn’t know herself. The assignment was over. Nothing definitive had been uncovered, but it had been determined that the transfer of the plans had in all likelihood been unsuccessful. After descriptions of the multifaceted complications, headquarters had ordered a withdrawal overnight, and the problem, as it was now called, was to be left on his own in the mountains. The man could not be released.

  So what did she want now? She parked the car in the familiar spot, climbed over the ridge and looked across at the mine entrance, the windmill and the barrels on the opposite ridge. She did not see the cabin. There was just a blackened spot. As she crossed the canyon below she was met with a light scent of smoke.

  She took her weapon out of the bag, swung out the cylinder, slipped her fingers into the frame, looked down the barrel, closed the cylinder again, shoved the gun and a flashlight into her belt and carefully climbed up to the little plateau.

  The charred beams of the cabin had collapsed into a pile. A wisp of smoke rose from the middle. Helen looked around. The only explanation she could come up with was that Cockcroft and Carthage had tried to get rid of any evidence. They’d been the last ones there. But that didn’t seem very likely to her. She cocked the hammer.

  It was a humid, overcast, late afternoon, and she felt slightly terrified about entering the darkness—because of the darkness. In theory it didn’t matter what time you entered a pitch-dark cave, day, evening or night; but the thought of darkness falling above while she was wandering around in the dark beneath the earth, and that she wouldn’t emerge into the light but rather to a dark, starless night, a night that looked the same as underground, made her uncomfortable in a way that might have caused someone more simple-minded than Helen to wonder whether feelings of shame and guilt were playing hide and seek in the harmless landscape and lighting conditions.

  “Nonsense,” she said to herself, and followed the artificial beam of light into the tunnel. Occasionally she turned into a side tunnel in order to study the hand markings, and her level of excitement rose step after step. She started calling Carl’s name even before she made it into the deepest cave. No answer. Just darkness and silence and the briny smell of the pool.

  The first thing she saw in the beam of light was a muddy, tied-up bundle of clothing lying atop the bolt-cutters, surrounded by a circle of moisture. Helen immediately recognized what had been attempted—and had remained merely an attempt.

  She stood on the bank of the pool for nearly a minute holding her breath. She called his name again. She heard the droning echo of her voice, and a shudder ran down her back. But it wasn’t a result of the thought of what might be hidden beneath the glassy-smooth surface of the water that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, it was the sound of her own voice. More precisely, the memory of the repulsion she’d had for her voice since she was young. The strangeness, the insecurity and the little thought: how much time has passed. How young I was. And how pointless it all was.

  She had no idea why this made such a strong impression on her at this particular moment. And it passed quickly.

  She sat in the car for a long time without turning the key in the ignition. She smoked two cigarettes and watched a fly on the windshield. Then she started the engine and switched on the high beams.

  65

  Further Events

  Oh, the indecipherability of the predictable.

  CALVIN SCOTT

  IF ONE WISHED, one could with a clear conscience end this chronicle of none-too-pleasant events at this point. Not much more happened beyond what has already been reported.

  A key went missing at the Sheraton Hotel. A man in the Empty Quarter made a fortune when he was able to sell a cheaply acquired espresso machine for ten times what he had paid for it. A young, light-skinned woman (of Norman extraction) and her three-year-old child were found in the mountains with their throats slit. An amulet in the shape of a demon was found in the gaping hole in the boy’s throat. The crime was never solved.

  Neither Spasski nor Moleskine won the Nobel Prize. Their renown faded away, even if you wouldn’t guess it from the magnitude of their Wikipedia pages. A united Africa was never founded.

  The police superintendent of Targat felt forced to replace his three half-Arab, half-European officers, Canisades, Polidorio and Karimi, with less well-trained officers. Canisades’ corpse was discovered in a desert no man’s land in the vicinity of an abandoned liquor distillery, with wire around his throat. He had been sent there to investigate the disappearance of two fellah sons who had mistakenly been dragged into the quadruple murder in a pastoral commune. Hanged for Canisades’ murder was an old bootleg distiller who had no sons, no alibi, and, if one is entirely honest, no motive.

  Amadou Amadou headed south, sold a car with a bloodstained driver’s seat to some nomads on the road to Nouakchott and was last seen in the vicinity of Dimja, where his trail went cold.

  Karimi left the police force in 1973 after he was pulled from his bulldozer by residents of the Salt Quarter during the fifth purge and nearly stoned to death. He was treated for nearly two years in a French hospital specializing in spinal injuries. Afterward he returned to the coast in a wheelchair, just as misanthropic as before. He turned down a position in the Interior Ministry. For nearly a year he helped pour drinks at his brother’s bar and scared off the customers, until he was granted a modest pension and took up oil-painting.

  He came to painting almost accidentally during one of his outings down near the port. In a shop window he noticed a painting set with a cluster of marten-hair brushes surrounded by zinc tubes that looked like plump, colorful sausages—for tourists, and overpriced. Using advice from his old contacts he was able to negotiate to buy the set for an eighth of the original price and applied himself henceforth to magical realism.

  He was able to sell a few paintings, took part in minor exhibitions, and landed a spot in a group exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1977. The exhibition catalog is difficult to come by, but any interested party can still find a painting rakishly signed Q. Karimi in the Targat police presidium today. It has adorned the entrance hall for thirty years at this point, attending to the space with an appealing composition of handsome female faces, grisly skulls and ghostly bare trees circled by bats. The artist died of pneumonia in 1979.

  Finally Polidorio, as we remember, set out for Tindirma in his Mercedes on a Saturday morning in 1972 and has been missing ever since. Photos of him were put up all over Targat and Tindirma for a while, then after a while only in Targat, and then, finally, only in the police presidium there. He was declared dead in 1983 and this declaration has to this day never been contested.

  In a letter, Heather Gliese wrote that her mother led a happy and fulfilled life and remained spry and healthy until she died peacefully in her sleep a few days before her seventy-second birthday. She was survived by four grandchildren, her library comprised 8,000 volumes in several languages, and a recurring nightmare that plagued her for a time in middle age and led to an unpleasant form of insomnia disappeared on its own in the end, without the aid of a therapist.

  One could end the book with a few last harmonious notes. Perhaps a brief description of the landscape, a panoramic view of the jagged silhouette of the Kangeeri moun
tains in evening light, valleys swathed in pink and lavender mist, ravines filled with crimson shadows, a few bats, a picturesque mule. Ry Cooder playing guitar. A windmill enters the screen from the left.

  Of course, if one were utterly fearless and in the right mood, one could also take another glance at a figure not entirely insignificant in this story, a man whose convoluted fate has had us on pins and needles for quite a long while, a man who fell beneath the wheels of fate neither by his own volition nor entirely by accident, but rather solely and exclusively because of a process of false logical deduction; through the belief in the innocence of a guilty party. A man with memory loss.

  Shall we? A quick glance at the camera assistants, fleeting shoulder shrugs on both sides, and the camera is already zooming in on the opening of a mine which was already recognizable as a tiny dot on the opposite mountainside but now quickly looms larger in the picture, darker, until the entire screen is swallowed and with a mix of tracking shots and complicated special effects we travel deep into the mountain.

  If we had a night-vision device available to us, we would now see the flickering silhouette of a human figure in a muddy pool. Circling the pool, the shaky image would show us the cramped upper body from all sides, would show the man who had for many hours been struggling desperately with thirst and sleep and death. Then a quick cut to the face, devoid of all hope. We could exhibit the familiar mix of voyeurism and empathy with regard to this person’s suffering, could watch him to the point of his ultimate death or his highly implausible—given the well-known circumstances—rescue.

  Of course, we should also admit that we do not have access to such a night-vision device. And even if we did, what good would it do us in reality? It’s dark in the cave, so dark that there isn’t so much as a shimmer of residual light in the depths of this mine that could be intensified by whatever technical means. Complete, all-permeating, impenetrable darkness surrounds us, so that we must kindly ask the reader to imagine the following in his or her mind.

  66

  Beautiful Memories

  The ball I threw while playing in the park

  Has not yet reached the ground.

  DYLAN THOMAS

  CARL PROPPED HIMSELF UP on his left elbow. He propped himself up on his right elbow. He remembered once swimming out into the gray sea one morning at first light. It must have been the Atlantic or another great sea. He was surrounded by yellow fog which had grown more dense over the water, nothing but yellow fog everywhere, and the shore had long since disappeared. He hadn’t really lost his orientation, but an abstract, nameless fear suddenly rose in him. Alone at sea and with nothing to grab hold of anywhere around him, nothing but bottomless water below, in a world without shape, swathed in yellow gauze, he had believed that he sensed death. He could still hear the brooding seagulls on the shore, but what if they had taken off? He swam back, and when he had swum what he took to be twice the distance he thought it would be to the shore, he heard the gulls behind him. Horrified, he changed direction again. His body was getting cold, his muscles were growing weak, and it occurred to him that the smartest thing to do was to stay in one spot and wait for the sun to burn off the fog so he would be able to muster his last remaining strength to make it back. But in a panic he didn’t think he was capable of it. He swam further and further in the direction he’d already gone, and just when he thought he was done for, the fog lifted and he saw that he had been swimming parallel to the shore the whole time just a stone’s throw from land.

  Now, in a muddy pool in the depths of a mountain, buried beneath kilometers of rock, this seemed one of the most serene memories of his entire life. He wished he could die in the ocean beneath the yellow light of an indifferent sun, swallowed up by clear salt water. Spray splashed in his face, telegraph poles flitted past, both hands gripped the steering wheel.

  A sandblaster was aimed at his windshield. He wrapped a piece of cloth around his head and opened the door. A bucket-load of sand blew into the car; he closed the door.

  He kept coming to his senses, and then saw the shadows on the bank of the pool. He thought pensively for a while about how you could tell whether you were already dead, and realized a man was sitting next to him.

  “Hot here,” he said, and Carl, who had no desire to talk with ghosts, said nothing in reply. He was looking at a green building on the other side of the street, above which a green flag waved.

  “Hot here,” the other man repeated.

  “Yeah,” said Carl grumpily, then he submerged himself and butted his head against the iron rod. It barely even hurt any more.

  “What’s the story?”

  “What?”

  “Your name!”

  “Huh?”

  Carl looked around fearfully. But nobody was there, only a little girl who put a glass of mint tea on the table in front of him. He practically burned his tongue. He waved his hand back and forth above the hot tea and then asked: “What’s your name?”

  “You first,” said the ghost.

  “You started this.”

  “What?”

  “It was you who started.”

  “Fine,” said the ghost, imitating Carl’s swatting hand motion.

  “Herrlichkoffer.”

  “What?”

  “Herrlichkoffer. Not so loud. Or Lundgren. But for you, Herrlichkoffer.”

  “Herrlichkoffer for me.”

  “Right! And now write your name here—here—here.”

  The ghost shoved a pad of notepaper across the table. Was this some kind of experiment? Or did they really want to know his name now? He began to write, but before he had even written seven letters the other man had already jumped up and run off down the street. “Your notebook,” Carl called after the crazy man, but he didn’t hear him. And he hadn’t only forgotten his pad and pen, he had also not paid for his tea. The girl asked Carl whether he was going to pay for it.

  He put money on the table and she swept the coins from the table into her dirty, little hand, and at the end of the street a Chevrolet braked to a stop and four men in white djellabas got out. He saw her by chance… and the next image was: he was running. Running away from the men toward his car, saw that the Mercedes was blocked in, saw a white djellaba on the passenger seat and threw the door open. Threw the djellaba on and tried to blend in with the throng of people on the street. Screaming. The men. The desert. He practically stumbled over a boy lying face-down in the sand. The boy lifted his head listlessly. His face was swollen, the skin on his forehead cracked. He was wearing a blue uniform jacket with gold braiding and had an assault rifle in his hands. He had no pants on. A light-blue sock hung around one of his ankles. A question mark of dried blood below his nose.

  “A—a,” said the boy barely audibly.

  “What?” Carl turned to look for his pursuers. Then he looked at the boy again.

  “A—a.”

  “What?”

  The boy dropped his head, gulped with his eyes closed, and then opened his mouth with a clicking sound.

  “At—ta,” he groaned. He cried.

  “I don’t have any water,” yelled Carl, took the gun from his hands and motioned over his shoulder. “Tindirma. That way.”

  He ran. As he was running he threw the rifle sling over his head and reached for the safety catch. The gun had no safety catch. It was made of wood.

  67

  The King of Africa

  We did not create the heaven and the earth, and everything between them, for amusement. If we wished to create a diversion, we could have initiated it without any of this, if indeed we were to do so.

  SURAH 21: 16–17

  HIS SKULL BANGED rhythmically against the iron rod, and then all of a sudden he thought he felt the rod give. “To arms, citizens,” he mumbled, pulling weakly at the chain and falling over sideways. He got back up and pushed the rod back and forth with both hands but couldn’t tell whether it was just his soggy hands that were giving or if perhaps the footing of metal was indeed loosening.
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br />   Carl yanked and shoved the rod like a child who feels a loose tooth in his mouth and then touches it and pushes and pulls it for so long with his tongue that he loses feeling not only in the tooth but in his tongue and whole mouth and can no longer tell whether the tooth was ever really loose. He threw his body against it, swung back and forth and kept the mechanical motion going despite appalling pain, until his strength finally flagged. He didn’t dare test the result of his efforts for a long time, but when he finally straightened his upper body he pulled the rod out of the rocky ground with virtually no effort.

  He flopped down on all fours on the bank, hit his head on a rock, and lay for a long time sobbing in the darkness.

  He had no trouble finding the narrow tunnel out of the muddy cave: around a large boulder, that’s where the ascent began. To the right and left he could feel chisel-mark-covered rock walls—the passageway was barely shoulder width. The chain around his neck and the iron rod attached to it dragged along behind him. The noise stopped every few seconds when he froze in order to stretch his arm out into the darkness ahead. His desire to flop down on the spot and sleep was incredibly strong, but it was surpassed by his will to leave the darkness behind as quickly as possible. As expected, the passageway soon broadened. He could tell by the echo.

  If he remembered correctly, he was now in a cave about his height from which various other tunnels branched off. He had no idea how many other tunnels and which one was the right one. Deciding quickly, he crawled down the next tunnel to the right, which immediately started to ascend. It went through the rock in long, serpentine curves. Then came a short flat section, then it ascended again. Carl could feel his waterlogged skin sloughing off and bleeding. He tried to stand up two or three times, but his fear of unseen chasms always sent him immediately back onto all fours. He was also too weak to walk. All of a sudden a pile of debris blocked his way. He felt around. His left hand sank into something slippery and smelly. He tried to climb over the debris but it went up to the ceiling. A horrible thought gripped him.