When he stood on the roof at dawn and rang the jerry-rigged bell, when he saw the beloved wretches hurrying toward him from all directions, when they came into his building chattering and giggling, singing and waving, sad and cheerful, he knew all the toil was for naught. Their destiny amidst the mountains of rubbish was foregone and irrevocable from birth, as though the religion they adhered to was for once more than a tall tale, and the naively colorful, bright hope of education and freedom that Jean was trying to seed in their souls lit dully and unsteadily, weak and easily extinguished in a world benighted by superstition and patriarchy. But they were lit! And Jean, who in the course of his life had begun many things and failed to follow through with them, stayed true to his purpose. He was the teacher of the Salt Quarter, and he remained so year after year.
Class began at sunrise in summer as in winter. The first hour was devoted to the Latin alphabet, a ritual Jean had adopted from the Spaniard. A as in Advancement. H as in Humanism. There were very few words with Q. Jean wrote on the board and the pupils wrote with chalk on wooden tablets that belonged to the school. The tablets were as smooth as if they’d been sandblasted, and they were wiped clean with rags at the end of the lessons.
In early 1972, at which point Jean had already been in the Salt Quarter for two years, there was a minor revolution in terms of writing. Abderrahman, the son of the water salesman, got hold of a pencil somewhere and for the sake of showing off began to write on pieces of scrap paper. Thereupon Khalid Samadi, the local baker and thus far above a water salesman, paid a great sum to acquire for his son a pencil stub and a small spiral notebook with half the pages still blank. Just a few weeks later only the poorest of the poor were still writing on the wooden tablets.
The best method to get hold of a writing utensil was to undertake the four-hour march to the coast and to ask tourists there for them. “Pour l’école, pour l’école” was an argument to which the mysterious Europeans seemed far more open than to “J’ai faim” croaked from an empty stomach. They accepted the risk of getting lost in the city of more than a million, of getting caught or carried off by soldiers or other riff-raff, or of never again returning for whatever other reason. Beyond the harbor lay boxes of squished vegetables, it was possible to pick up an hour’s work in the Ville Nouvelle if you were lucky, and in the southern part of the city the danger of being thrown into a truck equipped with bars like a jail cell was highest. Every third trip ended in tragedy. Like insects drawn to a light, however, the children still tumbled over the barrier of rubbish toward the bounty beyond.
One of the four Mohammeds wrote with a sharpened wooden stick that he dipped into home-made ink derived from coffee grounds. Rassul owned a felt pen that he constantly spat into the top of so that greenish fluid would emerge from the tip. But the king of the alphabetized was Aiyub.
Aiyub was a leper of limited intelligence. He didn’t know his family and lived in a hole in the ground covered with cardboard. He was too weak to make the journey into town: a mine had blown off his lower left leg. He was the last pupil still writing on a wooden tablet until one day with great show he pulled a pen out from beneath his djellaba. The pen was made of polished metal that glinted so smoothly and dully and nobly that it might even have been silver. No, it definitely was silver! Because there were strange letters on the clip, an unpronounceable word that amazed even the teacher. Nobody had ever seen a writing utensil like it. You could make the tip of the pen poke out, and by pressing a mechanical gadget the push-button at the back would pop out. If you held the pen to the back of another student’s neck and pressed on the mechanical gadget you could inflict a funny little pain.
Aiyub looked after his pen like a treasure. For four weeks he held it with two hands when he slept, until he passed away from dysentery and his best friend Buhum inherited the precious object. Buhum couldn’t read or write; he traded the pen to Chaid for a picture of the footballer Johan Cruyff and a peppermint candy. Chaid lost the pen to Driss because he bet that Hitler had been French. Driss had no greater desire than to see a naked girl take a pee. And so the pen ended up with Hossam, who had a sister.
Hossam was as stupid as a sheet pile in water, and he took apart the mechanism. He stretched the metal spring and lost a part of the push-button mechanism in the sand and pricked his sister in the eye with the empty barrel. Shrieking, his mother swatted the diabolical thing out of his hand and threw it out the door. Hossam was writing on a wooden tablet the next day again. People later found individual parts of the pen in the sand beneath the corrugated-metal shack. Hossam’s little sister dug out the cartridge and used it as a spine for a wobbly straw doll, her favorite, so it could sit upright.
This little sister answered to the name of Samaya. Samaya was seven or eight years old and of unrivaled beauty. An old Tuareg, a man so old that he had been cradled in the arms of the last king of the Massina Empire, said that to look at Samaya’s face was to comprehend Allah’s creation. She was the first one to school every morning. She was barely more intelligent than her brother, but she had the angelic quality of heart that earns one eternal life. There wasn’t an evil thought in her, her purity unblemished. When the fifth purge compassed the Salt Quarter, Samaya ripped herself free of her fleeing mother’s hand and ran back into the shack, where her beloved doll was. Together with the doll she was buried beneath a toppled wall of the structure. A bulldozer rolled backwards over the spot. It lifted its shovel like a priest raising the Ark of the Covenant, showed it to the infidels, and then dumped the entire contents onto the mound of rubbish.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WOLFGANG HERRNDORF waited until 2010 to make his literary breakthrough with Why We Took the Car, which has sold more than two million copies in Germany, has been translated into thirty-four languages, and was made into a feature film. By this time he was already suffering from an incurable brain tumour. He continued to write for the next few years, completing Sand, which won the 2012 Leipzig Book Fair prize. When he died in 2013 he was recognized as a unique and brilliant literary talent.
TIM MOHR is an award-winning translator of such authors as Alina Bronsky, Stefanie de Velasco, and Charlotte Roche. He also translated Wolfgang Herrndorf’s previous novel, Tschick, published in English as Why We Took the Car. In addition, he has collaborated on memoirs by musicians Duff McKagan, Gil Scott-Heron, Paul Stanley, and Joe Walsh. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Inked, and Playboy, among other publications, and his book Stirb nicht im Warteraum der Zukunft, a history of East German punk rock, was recently published by Heyne. Prior to starting his writing career he earned his living as a club DJ in Berlin. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
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COPYRIGHT
Pushkin Press
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London, WC2H 9JQ
Original text © 2011 Rowohlt Berlin Verlag GmbH, Berlin
English translation © Tim Mohr 2017
Sand was first published as Sand in Berlin, 2011
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut London
ISBN 978 1 7822 7281 6
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