“They couldn’t have!” he yelled. “They really didn’t need to do this!” He made his way back to the cave abysmally slowly, reeling, slithering, scooting and scrambling all the way, and once again went to the right. He was barely sentient at this point.
The next tunnel went steeply down and the one beyond did as well. He crawled only a few meters into each before the slope convinced him he wasn’t going the right way.
The next tunnel went up. “This is the right one, it must be,” he said, scraping along one hand after the next. He kept dozing off for seconds at a time. The passageway went on and on. Up, then a flat section, then up again. Then a pile of debris blocked his way. His left hand hit on something slippery and smelly.
He heard himself scream like a two-year-old, and once he had calmed down again he tried to figure out what the slippery stuff was. Whether it was rotten or whether it might be edible. But after a day and a half in a muddy pool his senses were numb. He couldn’t figure out what the stuff was, and the fact that he’d even thought about it made him realize that his final mental and physical breakdown was very close at hand.
Back in the cave he marked with a stone the dead-end tunnel he had now crawled up twice. Then he tried to think of how many passageways went out from this cave. Was it three? Or four? He didn’t know. He couldn’t remember. In order to be sure, he took another painful crawl counterclockwise around the cave. One that went upward… another that went upward… then came the one that had been marked. So only three passageways! A dead end, a tunnel that ended at the muddy pool, and one that led to freedom. Must lead to freedom. But which one? The one on the right? The one on the left? His ability to think logically had abandoned him. It would certainly be possible by light to memorize the layout of a room with three exits. But three passageways in a pitch-black cave that you can only feel was nothing short of an amorphous nightmare. It seemed to him that the tunnel not directly next to the one he had marked must be the right one. But then it occurred to him that with just three exits, they were all directly next to each other. He heard himself wheezing in the dark. His intuition was adamant that he should go left, but that same intuition told him that his spatial orientation was so muddled that he shouldn’t depend on intuition at all, and so he went to the right once again.
The tunnel he headed into went down steeply for ten or fifteen meters, then flattened out and then came to a cross-shaped intersection.
Both side tunnels were long, as Carl found out, and petered out. He marked the entrances and crawled on. His last hopes were fading. At least in the mud he had been struggling against something concrete, against water and metal. Here he was struggling against nothingness. Stuffy, hot, labyrinthine darkness that was swallowing him up. Had already swallowed him up.
Other passageways went off to the right and left. He couldn’t find stones that he could mark them with, so he left them unexplored. At some point he turned into a passageway he took to be wider than the others. There were chisels and stones at the entrance, and he tried in vain to carry some of them in his mouth. He would have had plenty of use for them. Tunnels suddenly branched off every few meters. To the left, to the right, ascending and descending, and at some stage he collapsed and lay down. His face on the cool stone. He would never get out of this labyrinth without help. He just hoped to be able to nod off and die peacefully, but the finality of death kept him from falling asleep. Maybe just to the end of this broad passageway. He dragged himself along on his shredded hands, elbows and knees through a long, sustained curve—and then it brightened.
It was a surreal, otherworldly, disembodied light. It didn’t touch any objects, it just hung before his eyes like fog. He turned his head back and forth, but the fog of light turned with him. In the middle of the fog a point. He stared just to the side of it and the point became more distinct. With the last of his strength he crawled another twenty, thirty meters toward it, until he assured himself that the shimmering point increased in intensity as he went closer so that it could only be a reflection of the light from the distant exit. Then he collapsed.
In a single dream that kept endlessly repeating, he saw himself drinking from a bottle of water that Helen handed him.
When he opened his eyes, he was in complete darkness. The point of light had disappeared. He blinked and looked all around. The point was still gone. But he did not panic. The sun has set outside, he told himself, the entire world is dark. And he fell back to sleep. His body was feverish. His mouth was dried out and as hard as wood. And when he finally felt himself coming to, he was afraid to open his eyes for a long time. He was sick from hunger and thirst and pain and anxiety. But the shimmer of light was there again, and it was brighter than before.
As he crawled toward it he began to recognize the first contours. After two bends he was able to make out the ground he was moving over. He hoisted himself to his feet. The iron rod swung back and forth into his knees. The air improved, the rocks took on shapes and colors, and finally he was able to see a bit of sky in the not too far distance, framed by jagged stone.
He shielded his eyes from the dazzling light with a blood-and-mud-encrusted arm. He stopped on the narrow plateau where the miner’s cabin sat. He breathed like a tiny bird. The windmill spun. Morning had just broken.
For a long time Carl just stood there and looked out at the comforting, deserted world, a world of violet mountain tops, valleys immersed in pink and lavender, ravines filled with purple shadows. A bat shot over Carl’s shoulder and into the mine. He thought he heard a quiet knocking. The sound was so quiet that he wasn’t sure whether it was coming from the wooden cabin or from his left temple.
At the same instant the vitally important questions returned: Where can I get water? How can I get medical help? And most important of all: How can I get out of here?
The door of the cabin crashed open, banged into a rock and slammed shut again. Someone was romping around inside. The door opened again, and Hakim of the Mountains came hopping out, naked except for a tattered pair of underwear dangling around his knees. He looked horrible. His feet were tied together with hemp rope. Dried excrement clung to his flanks. His wrists were tied, too, but the rope connecting the two of them had been severed. He hopped awkwardly out into the morning, his underwear slipped further down to his ankles. The Winchester under his arm. He stared at Carl. He shouted.
“We know each other,” yelled Carl, holding up his bloody hands in a peaceful gesture.
“Indeed,” said Hakim, cocking the rifle. “Fucking American!”
“I’m not with the others! I’m not one of them!”
“Of course not—and I’m the King of Africa.”
“I didn’t do anything to you!”
“You didn’t do anything to me! No, only your wife, that stinking pile of camel dung!” shouted the old man, aiming, and putting a bullet between Carl’s eyes.
Struggling to keep his balance, he hopped twice on the spot, then hopped back into the cabin and undid his ankle restraints. At about noon he packed his belongings, dragged Carl’s corpse into the cabin, poured gasoline over everything and threw in a lit match. Then, with his bundle, he climbed down to the low-lands, Hakim III, the last great miner of the Kangeeri massif.
68
The Madrasa of the Salt Quarter
Tremblez, tyrans, et vous perfides
L’opprobre de tous les partis,
Tremblez! Vos projets parricides
Vont enfin recevoir leurs prix!
Tout est soldat pour vous combattre,
S’ils tombent, nos jeunes héros,
La terre en produit de nouveaux,
Contre vous tout prêts à se battre!
‘LA MARSEILLAISE’
ARMS STRETCHED OUT to the sides of his body as if he’d been crucified, a blue plastic canister in one hand and a rusted wrench in the other, Jean Bekurtz stood on the roof of the school building looking eastward and waited for the sun to rise.
Jean was the offspring of a family of French civi
l servants and had fought in Indochina as a young man and—as his mother confided to the family doctor—had not emerged entirely free of damage.
After the removal of General Navarre, Jean stayed in the Far East for a time and then began a restless life of travel that took him to many places in the world, just not back to France. Finally, around 1960, he wound up on the North African coast, the first harbinger of a generation who saw their primary mission as calling into question their parents’ lifestyle.
He made a modest profit selling leather sandals, hats, suntan oil, beach towels, key chains, T-shirts, handmade jewelry, sunglasses and, once in a while, pot, to the tourists. It wasn’t an overly fulfilling life, but it probably would have gone on that way for quite a long while if not for the fact that Jean met the charismatic Edgar Fowler III by chance one day on the beach at Targat. The two of them stumbled upon each other, and they recognized something in each other immediately. Left Siddhartha, right Feltrinelli, soul brothers, and all that remained in Jean’s head about the first weeks of their friendship was, for good reason, nothing more than a hazy glow. They lived together in a tiny little room with an ocean view (Jean’s recollection) or a view of the mountain of garbage (Fowler’s recollection), they were interested in Italian films about the exploitation of women by society, played around with a children’s chemistry set and read ever more obscure writers until finally they hit upon the idea (though the how and why of this venture remain obscure) of founding a commune in the desert that would fund itself by growing vegetables.
Fowler provided the general ideological orientation of the project and in no time at all recruited a substantial number of exceedingly good-looking young women while Jean primarily handled the farming concept.
As a child of the city he didn’t have the slightest idea about what he called at that time the wonder of nature, but his enthusiasm was contagious. He could be seen mornings waltzing barefoot through the blue-green millet sprouts breaking through the hard desert soil with a yellow plastic watering can in his hand, or holding lectures about the incomparable feeling of working the earth by the sweat of your own brow and sharing the well-earned payoff in solidarity with like-minded people. It was Jean’s exuberant, sometimes fanatical enthusiasm that held the community together at first, and it was also Jean who first lost his interest in vegetables again.
The unbearable sun coming over the Kaafaahi cliffs and the even more unbearable sand! The tedious planting of seeds that just didn’t want to grow and had to be constantly sprinkled with water that needed to be endlessly, exhaustingly hauled in! This wasn’t his idea of the wild life.
The first rifts developed among what had grown to eight other members of the commune, and as a result of ideological differences and after endless discussions about the practice of sexual freedom and the fact that, in his mind, it was not being practiced freely at all among the people Jean described as quote unquote adults, after just a few weeks Jean became the first member who had to be banished from the commune, personally excommunicated by his friend Edgar Fowler. That was in 1966.
Back in Targat, his old business in trinkets was sluggish. Jean had competition now: there were suddenly a dozen long-hairs living on the beach. He was forced to switch to selling opium; the police now took three-quarters of his earnings. He couldn’t afford a room. He fell into a bad state. It was second only to Dien Bien Phu as the worst period of his life. He was even entertaining thoughts of returning to France when one beautiful day a broke American approached him and tried to trade him a surfboard for his daily fix.
Jean had never seen anything like the board before. The contemplative form, the dazzling whiteness. Later that same evening he paddled out into the open ocean on his stomach. He found the new perspective thrilling, the freedom, the meditation of the waves. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again and saw dark clouds on the horizon it didn’t bother him. When the wind shifted and turned into a storm, it didn’t bother him. As the swells grew higher and steeper and swept him from the board, he found it incredibly humorous for a few seconds. Then he began his fight for survival. He had immediately lost any sense of orientation. Underwater he crashed against the rocks and gasped for air in the thunderous spindrift. Finally a breaker tossed him up onto land.
In his completely smoke-addled mind he exaggerated the danger he had found himself in, greatly, and while he was still lying on the beach wheezing and coughing and watched as the water also spat out his board then sucked it back in and spat it out again, the moment intensified in him into a ball of radiant clarity. This wasn’t a fight against rice-eating gooks any more, this wasn’t a scheme of some petty veggie commune, this was the omnipotence of omnipotent nature, a decisive moment. The ocean had shown him what it was capable of, and he, Jean Bekurtz, had shown the ocean that he could come to terms with it. The fine line, the great light, the sentence written across the sky: you must change your life. And he changed it.
Every day he paddled out when the surf was up. It took him about two weeks before he was able to stand up and glide a few meters down a wave, and in the following years anyone who vacationed on the beach at Targat would see him standing on his board regardless of the weather, his arms pressed to his sides or at his back or folded across his chest. Sometimes he sang while surfing. Jean had stopped smoking and was so clear-headed that clear-headed wasn’t even the right word for it any more. Sun-browned skin stretched over his muscles, saltwater and sun bleached his hair.
It went that way for nearly three years without him ever experiencing a moment of doubt. He was the first waverider these shores had ever seen, and there are probably still pictures in European and American photo albums from the time of a longhaired, Apollonian, tender young man practicing balancing with alternately joyfully shrieking, frightened, wide-eyed, cheeky or simply shocked ten-year-olds in the water near shore. Targat 1969.
But this life ended just as abruptly as it had begun. An emaciated Spaniard with two heavy suitcases had put up at the pension where Jean lived. This Spaniard had booked passage on a ship and was too weak to carry his own luggage. His bottom jaw had been eaten away by cancer, tumors grew on his neck, and his breath already smelled as if it was from another world. As he confided in Jean, he wanted to go back to his homeland to die, it was too late for medical treatment.
Smiling, Jean took both suitcases in one hand and his surfboard under his other arm and carried it all down to the harbor. Sitting between the bags on the pier, smoking, as the ship slowly grew larger and larger on the horizon, the Spaniard told Jean his life story. He spoke very quietly and gracefully, somewhat incoherently and with his mouth half closed as if trying not to breathe out too much of the afterworld into this one.
For eight years he had held a teaching position in the Salt Quarter, the only teacher there. Though to call it a teaching position would be overstating it. The head office never checked in at all, and as for the pay, he might almost as well have been working for nothing. Visibly straining, he described a few episodes of his pedagogical existence. He wiped the sweat from his face and tumors, held out his arm to show how big the children were, and added a few platitudes about eyes filled with curiosity, untainted minds and the bright laughter of children. Strictly speaking, the crux of all of his stories boiled down to the bell-like laughter of children. How he had educated them, how he had given them hope. How they called him Monsieur So-and-so and rewarded his jokes with their laughter. The gratitude in their grime-encircled eyes. Now their education would for ever go unfinished.
He mimicked their sad little faces at his departure, coughed blood onto the pier, and Jean had no trouble discerning the message behind the message. People like the Spaniard and himself could sniff each other out from a long way. He let the sick man give him the location of the school and a description of its environs, waved cheerfully one last time as the ship departed, and two days later the Salt Quarter had a new teacher.
Jean Bekurtz had no more pedagogical training than his predecessor, but anyone c
ould read, write and do math. The classroom was a mud-brick square with no windows, light came only through the open roof, half covered with mats.
The tables and chairs were from the beginning of the colonial period. Some still had slogans from the Khan war scratched into them. When too many children turned up to class they had to sit on canisters they brought with them, or they leaned one-legged against the wall. The front wall was newly adorned with a chalkboard in the form of a black-coated surfboard with both ends cut off.
The Spaniard had not exaggerated. There were too many pupils to count. Even on holidays charmingly bedraggled, trusting kids turned up to be entertained, and Jean sat them in his lap and gave them lessons in Greek history. When he had extra money he bought popsicles or chocolates or other things little hearts desired. They played with an old soccer ball during breaks, and if one of the little brown things managed to dribble around Monsieur Bekurtz he would pick them up and give them a wet kiss on the forehead as penalty. “You make me crazy!” he would yell, and the bell-like laughter of children answered him. Though for the most part they did indeed do school work.
The legendary thirst for knowledge of the underprivileged proved only half true. Like anywhere else, one and a half of them were intelligent, five were somewhat gifted, and the countless remaining students were charmingly simple. Some of the oldest and mistreated only came to class because they were too weak to work, because they were treated like dogs on the street, and because there was no room for the dregs in the distant Koran schools.
There were no school books. To pass on the love of reading and solving math problems, Jean clumsily recreated the smattering of knowledge he had retained from his own childhood, read from dime-store novels, or sketched diagrams from magazines on the blackboard. He found a schematic drawing of a cow in a pamphlet from a Franco-Belgian dairy corporation, and added to it four stomachs with implausible functions and sang the praises of appreciating nature. A dead starling lying on the threshold of the school one morning was dissected with a pocket knife, its wings compared to those of a Boeing. A fantastically complicated diagram of a combustion engine found in a motorcycle magazine and crudely recreated in chalk looked down at the children for weeks and was studied in every detail. Depending on the mood, some seventy excited children transformed themselves for weeks at a time into veterinarians, pilots and auto mechanics. The fact that none of them would ever actually have the chance to get into any of these fields was something that Jean spent long, lonely nights putting out of his mind. He awoke those mornings with a headache and it took great effort to keep his flicker of idealism burning after a night of such thoughts. He became sentimental over the years.
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