Sand E-Book

Wolfgang Herrndorf

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 617

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A sophisticated literary thriller set during the cold war - an ambitious and brilliantly crafted story of murder, memory loss and nuclear secrets... Somewhere in the North African desert, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out. Elsewhere, four westerners are murdered in a hippy commune and a suitcase full of worthless currency goes missing. Enter a pair of very unenthusiastic detectives, a paranoid spy whose sanity has baked away in the sun, and a beautiful blonde American with a talent for being underestimated. Sand is a gripping thriller - part Pynchon, part le Carré, part Coen brothers - an unsettling, caustically funny tale of pursuit and madness. Born in 1965, Wolfgang Herrndorf originally worked as a painter and illustrator before starting to write novels. He had his literary breakthrough in 2010 with Tschick, which has sold more than a million copies in Germany. By this point 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. He also documented his experiences of fighting his illness on a blog, Arbeit and Struktur, which was later published in book form. In 2013 he took his own life.

Leseprobe

WOLFGANG HERRNDORF

SAND

Translated by Tim Mohr

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

CONTENTS

Title PageBOOK ONE The Sea BOOK TWO The Desert BOOK THREEThe Mountains BOOK FOURThe Oasis BOOK FIVEThe Night About the Author About the PublisherCopyright

BOOK ONE

The Sea

1

Targat on the Sea

Each year we send a ship to Africa—sparing neither lives nor money—to seek answers to the questions: Who are you? What are your laws? What language do you speak? They, however, never send a ship to us.

HERODOTUS

ATOP THE MUD-BRICK WALL stood a man stripped to the waist, with his arms stretched out to the sides as if crucified. He had a rusted wrench in one hand and a blue plastic canister in the other. His gaze fell across tents and huts, piles of garbage and plastic tarps, and off out over the endless desert to a point on the horizon where soon the sun would rise.

When it was time, he banged the wrench and the canister against each other and shouted: “My children! My children!”

The eastern walls of the huts blazed pale orange. The hollow, dull rhythm died down as it receded into the alleyways. Shrouded figures, lying in the cool ditches like mummies, awoke, and cracked lips formed words of praise and offering to the one true God. Three dogs dipped their tongues into a dirty puddle. The whole night through the temperature hadn’t sunk below thirty degrees.

Unfazed, the sun rose above the horizon and shone down on the living and the dead, the believers and the non-believers, the wretched and the wealthy. It shone down on corrugated sheet metal, plywood and cardboard, on salt cedars and filth and a thirty-meter-high wall of trash that separated the Salt Quarter and Empty Quarter from the remaining parts of the city. An enormous number of plastic bottles and gutted vehicles gleamed in the sunlight, piles of empty battery casings, pulverized tiles, rubbish, mountains of fecal sludge and the corpses of dead animals. The sun rose above the wall and illuminated the first of the houses in the Ville Nouvelle, free-standing, two-story Spanish-style buildings, as well as the crumbling minarets on the outskirts of town. Silently it lit up the runway of the military airport, the wings of a left-behind Mirage 5, the souk and the adjacent administration buildings of Targat. The sun’s light glinted on the drooping metal roll-down gates of little shops and pressed through the blinds of the as yet unoccupied Central Commissariat, wandered up the alfalfa-grass-lined port street, gushed down the twenty-story Sheraton Hotel and shortly after six o’clock reached the sea, gently shielded by the coastal range. It was the morning of 23rd August 1972.

No wind blew, and no waves swelled. The sea stretched to the horizon as smooth as armor plate. A huge cruise ship with yellow smokestacks and strings of extinguished lights lay sleeping at anchor, empty champagne glasses on the railings.

Prosperity, as our friend with the blue plastic canister used to say, prosperity belongs to everyone. Just go out and take it.

2

The Central Commissariat

You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags.

NIXON

POLIDORIO HAD AN IQ of 102, calculated by means of a questionnaire for French school children aged twelve to thirteen. They’d found the questionnaire in the Commissariat, used as packing material for a box of forms printed in Marseilles, and filled it out with a pencil, one question after the next, in the allotted amount of time. Polidorio had been very drunk. Canisades, too. It was the long night of the files.

Twice a year mountains of paper would be piled up in the halls, cursorily inspected and then burned in the courtyard, an onerous duty that often took until dawn and traditionally fell to the most junior employees. Why some files were discarded while others were kept, nobody could explain. Management of the operation had been adopted from the French the way one might reflexively adopt a particular way of addressing a person, and the bureaucratic systems bore no relationship to their actual use. Only a few of the accused could read or write, trials were short.

In the middle of the night there had been an electrical outage at the Commissariat; it had taken Polidorio and Canisades hours to get hold of someone who had the Allen wrench needed to open the fuse box. For a while they continued working by candlelight, and under the influence of pot and alcohol their fatigue turned to euphoria. They staged a snowball fight in the courtyard using balled-up paper and a car chase through the hallways with rolling file cabinets. Canisades said he was Emerson Fittipaldi, Polidorio set a pile of scrap on fire with his cigarette, and then a bundle of special colonial-era credentials fell out of an overturned hanging file. They clamped the papers into a typewriter, entered made-up names and titles, and together they stumbled with them through the breaking daylight and into a bordello (“Bédeaux is the name, Special Prosecutor for the Virtue Committee…”).

And before they left, of course, the fateful IQ test. In hindsight Polidorio had only hazy memories of most of the experiences of that fatal night. But the test result stuck with him. One hundred and two.

“Alcohol, stress, electrical outage!” yelled Canisades with a small-breasted black girl on each knee. “Is that an excuse? We’ll just round it down to a hundred.”

Canisades’ test result had been significantly higher. Just how much higher was one of the things Polidorio couldn’t remember. But his own number stood from then on as if carved in stone in his memory. Although he was sure he would have scored higher in a sober state of mind—not higher than Canisades, but definitely higher—his score always occurred to him now whenever he didn’t understand something. When he struggled more than someone else to grasp something, when he laughed at a joke a split-second later than his colleagues.

Polidorio had always considered himself a rational and gifted person. When he looked back now he didn’t know what grounds he had for this belief. He had made it through school, professional training and his exams with little difficulty, but then again that was it. Always middle-of-the-road, average. Which is what his test score also implied: average.

Realizing one is not special is something that hits most people at some point in their lives, not uncommonly at the end of school or at the beginning of professional training, and it hits the intelligent rather more often than the unintelligent. But not everyone struggles with the realization in the same way. Those who weren’t sufficiently exposed as children to the ideals of personal merit, achievement, standing out, will perhaps accept the realization of pallid mediocrity as they would having too big a nose or thinning hair. Others, on the other hand, react to it with the stereotypical maneuvers, anything from dressing eccentrically or leading an eccentric lifestyle to ambitiously trying to find a self that they believe to be hidden inside them like a precious treasure, a sentiment granted even the last moron by the practice of psychoanalysis. And the sensitive ones spiral into depression.

A few days after Canisades had regaled the entire circle of work colleagues and friends with the glorious experiences of that night, Polidorio was standing in front of his locker, number 703, and saw that some prankster had used a pen to make a 1 out of the 7 and a 2 out of the 3.

For twenty-eight years he hadn’t wasted a thought on the magnitude and measurability of his intelligence—and now sometimes he could think of nothing else.

3

Coffee and Migraines

Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.

JOSEPH CONRAD

“WHY SHOULD I CARE about that? You can tell that to somebody, you can tell it to your briquettes for all I care, but not me.” Polidorio had poured himself a coffee and stirred it with a pen. The blue blinds were closed except for a tiny crack of white midday heat. “And you can’t just show up and drag someone in here. Hollerith machine! You don’t even know what that is. And I don’t care. The only thing I care about is: Where did it happen? It happened in Tindirma. Who is responsible there? Right. So pack it up and get out of here. No, don’t talk. Stop blathering. You’ve been talking for an hour. Now you need to listen.”

But the fat man didn’t listen. He just stood in front of Polidorio’s desk in a slovenly uniform, doing what everybody did around here. If they weren’t willing to co-operate they just talked nonsense. If one quizzed them about it, they just changed the subject to some other nonsense.

Polidorio hadn’t offered him coffee or a chair, and spoke to him rudely even though he was thirty years his elder and of equal rank. These were usually dependable ways to offend such people. But the fat man seemed immune to them. Unfazed, he talked about approaching retirement, trips in an official vehicle, horticulture and a vitamin shortage. For the fourth and fifth and sixth time he went over the topic of filling his gas tank and his ideas about transporting prisoners, spoke about justice, coincidence and going the extra mile. He pointed at the windows on the opposite wall (desert, sea), at the door (the long route through the Salt Quarter), the defective ceiling fan (Allah), and stomped with his foot on the bundle lying on the floor (the root of all evil).

The root of all evil was a boy with his wrists and ankles bound named Amadou, whom the fat man had picked up in the desert between Targat and Tindirma, a fact that figured only tangentially in his flood of words.

Had he ever heard of responsibility, Polidorio wanted to know, and received as an answer that successful police work was simply a question of technology. He asked what technology had to do with the crime scene, and received as an answer how difficult it was to farm near the oasis. Polidorio asked what farming had to do with it, and the fat man went on about food shortages, sand drifts, water shortages and the resentment of the neighbors on one side, and the prosperity, electronic brains and highly organized police on the other. He cast another glance at the defective Hollerith machine, looked around the room with feigned delight and, as there was no chair to be had, sat down on the prisoner, all without interrupting his flood of words for even a second.

“Quiet now,” said Polidorio. “Quiet. Listen to me.” He let the palms of his hands hover above the surface of the desk for a moment before placing them on either side of the coffee cup, braced on the desk by his fingers. The fat man repeated his last sentence. There were two buttons missing from his pants. Beads of sweat hung from his fleshy earlobes and swayed in rhythm. Suddenly Polidorio had forgotten what he wanted to say. He felt his temples pulsing.

His gaze fell on hundreds of tiny bubbles that had frothed up in his coffee cup from the agitation of the pen and which now gathered to form a spinning carpet. As the rotation slowed, the bubbles dispersed out to the rim of the cup, where they piled up in a ring-shaped wall. Inside every bubble a tiny head was enclosed, a head that stared at him with squinting eyes, smaller heads inside the smaller bubbles, medium-sized heads in the medium-sized bubbles and large heads inside the larger bubbles. The audience moved in sync, with military precision, and for a few seconds seemed locked in a sort of rigor mortis. Then the heads suddenly expanded, and when Polidorio exhaled a quarter of his audience died.

Gasoline vouchers, desert sand, foot and mouth disease, gaggles of children, rebels, presidential palace. Polidorio knew what the fat man wasn’t after. But he couldn’t figure out what he was after. The transfer of a suspect to Targat made no sense. Perhaps, he thought, the fat man was just playing it safe and wanted to avoid any sort of personal problem falling into his lap. Or perhaps his company-time junket to the coast was an end in and of itself. Perhaps he had some business to take care of here. Maybe he wanted to see the port district. And surely it had to do with money. Everything had to do with money. He probably wanted to sell a few things. He certainly wouldn’t be the first small-town sheriff to compensate for missed wages by dragging typewriters, blank paper or service revolvers to the souk. And if it didn’t have to do with money, it had to do with family. Perhaps he had a son here he wanted to visit. Or a fat daughter of marriageable age. Maybe he wanted to visit a bordello. Maybe his fat daughter even worked in a bordello, and he wanted to sell her his service revolver. Anything was possible.

A dull alarm bell interrupted his thoughts. Polidorio pulled a large wad of cloth out of the bottom drawer of his desk and smacked his palm down on a specific spot, known only to him. The alarm went silent. He got a package of aspirin out of the same drawer and said irritably, “That’s enough now. Get out of here. Go back to the oasis and take that with you.”

He pressed two tablets out of the blister pack. He didn’t have a headache, but if he didn’t take medicine now he’d have one in exactly half an hour. Every day at four. Nobody had been able to explain the source of these recurring attacks. The last doctor had held the X-rays up to the light, said something about things looking normal, and had advised Polidorio to see a psychologist. The psychologist had recommended medications, and the pharmacist, who had never heard of the medications, sent him to a wise man. The wise man weighed ninety pounds, was lying in the street contorted and sold Polidorio a scrap of paper with incantations written on it that had to be put under the bed. Finally, his wife brought a package of generic aspirin back from France.

It wasn’t mental. Polidorio refused to believe it was something mental. What kind of mind would trigger searing pain every day at the same time? There was nothing particular about four in the afternoon. It couldn’t have anything to do with work, the pain came on days off as well. It started at four and stuck around until he fell asleep. Polidorio was young, he was athletically fit, and fed himself no differently than he had in Europe. Very near the Sheraton was a shop with imported goods; he didn’t use local water even to brush his teeth. Was it the weather? If so, why didn’t he have headaches twenty-four hours a day?

In the lonely hours of the night, when the blight of the heat pushed in on him through the mosquito netting, when the nameless sea pounded the nameless cliffs and the insects cavorted beneath his bed, he came to believe it was neither a mental nor a bodily ailment. It was the country itself. In France he had never had headaches. They had started after two days in Africa.

He took the tablets in his mouth and slurped them down with two sips of coffee, feeling the light pressure descend through his throat. It was his daily ritual, and it bothered him to have the uncontrollably blathering fat man sitting there watching him conduct it. While he put the package back in the drawer, he said, “Or does this look like the receiving office for provincial bullshit? Go back to your oasis. You kaffir.”

Silence. Kaffir. He waited for the reaction, and the reaction came with just a single second’s delay: the fat man suddenly opened his eyes wide, formed a small O with his mouth and lackadaisically waved a hand at shoulder height. Then he kept talking. Oasis, the condition of the roads, Hollerith machines.

It had been two months since Polidorio started his job here. And for two months he’d wanted nothing else but to return to Europe. Already on the day of his arrival he had realized that his knowledge of human nature didn’t function among the foreign faces—a realization for which he had paid with his camera. His grandfather had been an Arab himself, but he had emigrated to Marseilles when he was young. Polidorio had a French passport and after his parents’ divorce had grown up in Switzerland. He’d gone to school in Biel, then later studied in Paris. He spent his free time in cafés, in cinemas and on tennis courts. People liked him, but when there were arguments they called him pied-noir. If his serve had been better, he might have been able to become a tennis pro. As it was, he became a policeman.

Like so much in his life, it had been by chance. A friend of his had taken him along to the entrance exam. The friend was rejected, Polidorio was not. During his year of training, society had changed without him catching wind of it. He wasn’t a political person. He didn’t read the papers. The rioters in Paris in May and the lunatics at Nanterre University had interested him as little as the gasping of the other side. Justice and laws were pretty much the same thing as far as he was concerned. He didn’t like the longhairs, but mostly for aesthetic reasons. He’d read ten pages of Sartre. It was easier, as his first girlfriend had written when she split up with him, to describe him by what he wasn’t than by what he was.

His second girlfriend he married. That was in May 1969, and he didn’t love her. She got pregnant immediately. The first year was hell. When he was offered a job in the former colonies because of his knowledge of Arabic, he took it straight away. Glossy photo books of picturesque deserts, primitive wooden sculptures on living-room shelves, idle chatter about roots. He didn’t have a clue about Africa.

The thing that had struck him more than anything else were the strange smells at the airport. Then the loneliness of the first few weeks before his family arrived. A picture in the daily paper: Thévenet at Mont Ventouz. A postcard from a friend: snow-covered Alps. The stench, the horrible headaches. Polidorio had started stopping in the street when he heard somebody speak pure French without an asthmatic gurgle. The sight of tourists, their feeling of abandon, the bright blonde women. He had applied to return; the French state just laughed at him. With every week he became more sentimental. French tourists, French newspapers, French products. Even the bums and longhairs who always turned up in packs, hiking single-file out of the mountains into the valleys with a pound of pot in their bags, only to be handcuffed there by him—even they stirred emotion in him. They were idiots. But they were European idiots.

The fat man was still talking. Polidorio shoved the coffee cup on his desk to the side. He knew he was making a mistake. He gripped the far edge of the desk with both hands and pulled his upper body forward, peering down into the space in front of it.

“Twenty dollars, yeah?”

The tied-up boy seemed to have passed out beneath the weight of the fat man.

“The high commissioner is speaking to you!” the fat man yelled, and he smacked the prisoner on the ear with the flat of his hand.

“Twenty dollars and a basket of vegetables?” repeated Polidorio.

“What?”

“Yes, you!”

“Yes, what is it, boss?”

“A couple of dollars and a basket of vegetables. You mowed down four people in Tindirma for that?”

“What?” The bundle began to revive. “Four people where?”

“Four people in Tindirma. Four whites.”

“I’ve never been to Tindirma in my life, boss. I swear!”

4

MS Kungsholm

Ellsberg showed the same childlike eagerness to share discoveries of a sexual nature as he did to share confidential nuclear technology. He once described his latest lover to the people at RAND the following way: “She had gaps between every tooth.”

ANDREW HUNT

THERE ARE NOT MANY PEOPLE who can be described in a single sentence. Normally one needs several, and even for ordinary people an entire novel is often not enough. Helen Gliese, who was leaning on the rail of the MS Kungsholm in white shorts, a white blouse, a white sunhat and giant sunglasses, chewing gum with a half-open mouth, looking at the swarm of people on the nearing shore, could be described in two words: pretty and stupid. With these two words one could send a stranger to the port and be sure that he would pick up the correct person among hundreds of travelers.

The amazing thing about it, though, wasn’t the brevity of the description. The amazing thing was that this description wasn’t the slightest bit apt. Helen wasn’t pretty. She was a collection of aesthetic commonplaces, an overabundance of personal hygiene and fashion effort, but she wasn’t pretty in the classical sense of the word. She was someone best seen from afar. Some photos of her could have been used on the cover of a fashion magazine—giving an impression of smoothness, coolness, elegance of form. But as soon as the image came to life, one became immediately baffled. Helen’s facial expressions were somehow off. The slow, monotonous sing-song of her voice produced the impression of an actress in a daytime TV series whose role is described in a note in the screenplay as rich and blasé, her arm and hand gestures were like a parody of a homosexual, and when one first met Helen, all of this, together with her excessive make-up and outlandish clothing, could delay for several minutes—or hours or days—the realization that what she actually said was logical and well thought out. Her thoughts were perfectly clear, and she formulated them effortlessly. Even more surprising was reading letters from her.

In other words, Helen was the exact opposite of stupid, and if not the opposite of pretty, at least far from the classical notion of beauty; none of which changed the fact that this description functioned fine for having her picked up at the port. Or would have functioned fine. It was Helen’s first visit to Africa and nobody picked her up.

5

The Acts of a Crackpot

He urged us to start at once, at the same time announcing his intention of accompanying us so as to protect us against treachery. I was much touched by this act of kindness on the part of that wily old barbarian toward two utterly defenseless strangers.

H. RIDER HAGGARD

THE ACCUSED WAS NAMED Amadou Amadou. Every single piece of evidence went against him, and the sum of the evidence was a death sentence. Amadou was twenty-one or twenty-two, a gangly young man who lived or had lived with his parents, grandparents and a dozen brothers and sisters two blocks from the scene of the crime, an agrarian commune in the oasis of Tindirma.

The commune consisted mostly of Americans, a few French, Spanish and Germans, a Polish woman and a Lebanese man; all told, twice as many women as men. The majority of them had got to know each other in the mid-1960s in the coastal region around Targat and had stumbled accidentally on the property in the oasis twenty kilometers away, a two-story building with a bit of land that was available to rent cheaply. The dream was of a natural, self-determined life, of collective organization and so forth. None of the communards had any experience of this sort of concrete utopianism. At first they lived from a laboriously irrigated field and junk they bought from the locals and exported to the First World; later came the occasional dealings in illegal substances.

Initially viewed with distrust, the longhaired, talkative, directionless, bumbling communards won the goodwill of their new neighbors relatively quickly through their openness and helpfulness. They reached out their hands in a friendly and generous manner to those around them, and those around them reached back hesitantly at first and then affectionately. Foreign jewelry was marveled at, hair was touched, food was exchanged. It was the time of the big speeches, the long discussions and implied fraternity. Eventually came a few small fortifications and the first unrest. Over the summer, the number of uninvited guests who sought to extract financial gains from the commune became unmanageable. Medical, technical and sexual services were requested and at least in part granted. The consequence was a series of troublesome conflicts, called misunderstandings internally, whereupon they pulled back from the local people more and more, initially in a diffuse way and then programmatically, receding to a strictly business relationship, until finally an additional meter was added to the top of the one-and-a-half-meter wall already surrounding the property. By just two votes, a tiny majority was to thank for the fact that shards of glass weren’t pressed into the fresh clay atop the new wall. All of this took place in the course of a few months.

The two most noticeable figures in the commune were a Scottish industrial scion named Edgar Fowler III and the French ex-soldier and drifter Jean Bekurtz. In one of their sober moments they had come up with the idea of the commune, recruited members with their infectious enthusiasm—among them a striking number of attractive women—and drafted a rough outline of what they called their philosophy.

But the desert quickly changed the outlook. Where initially one took up residence in the gray area of a discussion-friendly Marxism, the number of incense sticks in the household increased in a short amount of time. Between Kerouac and Castaneda, a half-meter of Trotsky molded away, and the idea of a constantly physically co-mingling mass of humanity (“It’s just a metaphor”) broke down due to the reluctance of the women, who were no longer inclined to acquiesce. At the time of our story, the commune had sunk to the level of a pathetic economic partnership of convenience—the prosperity of which seemed only negligibly better than it had been at the time of its founding.

In order to make the sequence of events and everything that follows understandable, a short explanation must be offered at this point of what we mean when we speak of “the oasis”.

Archaeological examinations had uncovered no evidence of earlier settlements on the site. In 1850, Tindirma was still a collection of three mud huts around a meager reservoir on the slope of an isolated rock spire in the desert. Geologists speak of a cone of volcanic origin. The highest elevation is 250 meters above sea level, and provides a view that even on good days doesn’t allow one to see anything more than sand all around, sand that had been blown into an endless field of crescent dunes by the constant wind from the coast. Only the western horizon offered even an inkling of moisture and green and blue.

Located at the crossing of two inconsequential caravan routes, the oasis first grew during the bloody battles surrounding the Massina Empire. Displaced Fula people with no belongings and, most importantly, with no livestock arrived here from the south, half naked and half starving, and negotiated the transition from a nomadic existence to farming. Three mud huts became fifty, pushing up the slope between scrubby acacias and doum palms.

Life is hard, and like many unwilling emigrants the Fula named the paltry patch of earth they cultivated after the place from which they’d fled: Nouveau Tindirma. In the space of a generation, the number of unfortunates there rose tenfold.

Historiography from that era does not exist in written or in credible oral form. The first documented image is a black and white photo from the 1920s of men with scarred faces. With deadened gazes and pressed into a dark rectangle, they are standing in the cargo bed of a Thornycroft BX, which is entering the freshly graded main street of a Tindirma that is barely recognizable; in the background is one of the first two-story buildings.

At the end of the 1930s two events profoundly transform Tindirma. The first is the arrival of a lost Swiss engineer, Lukas Imhof, whose car breaks down and who is hindered by the locals from repairing it. With practically no tools and just the help of a few Haratin, Imhof digs in the next few months a forty-meter-deep well next to the Kaafaahi cliffs, which henceforth provides the oasis with an abundance of water. Imhof is subsequently presented in ceremonial fashion with two refurbished spark plugs (family album, square photo).

The second is the mushrooming civil war in the south, which puts Tindirma in the most strategically advantageous location for smuggling arms and other resources. Only two or three families cultivate their millet fields any more; the rest bow out in favor of night work and flood the community with previously unknown prosperity and the routes south with dead bodies.

At about the same time, the first Arab merchant families relocate from Targat to Tindirma. Europeans with dark sunglasses and meticulously shaved necks drive through Tindirma in olive-green automobiles, and in 1938 the head office installs the first police station there. The appearance of state authority doesn’t change everyday life much at first. Anyone who values a peaceful life and can afford it maintains a private army; the police find themselves fighting primarily for their own security.

The transition from lawless to half-civilized entity comes to fruition only with the displacement of the civil war in the south and west. The arms-saturated region becomes receptive to other goods. Former smuggling barons invest in infrastructure, the first bars and hotels sprout up. In the mid-1950s there’s briefly a cinema. A paved road thrusts its way through the center of the oasis for several hundred meters, makes a weak feint at the coast and peters out in the sand. Two small mosques stretch their minaret fingers to the yellow sky. Religion exerts a moderate influence on the life of the municipality, strengthening the weak and the faithful and solidifying morals and civility through the clarity of godly thoughts, through education and shari’a law.

Parallel to the intrusion by state and religious organs, repeated attempts are made to change the name of the locale in order to erase the memory of its dark past, but neither the residents nor the Arabs nor the one or two cartographers who acknowledged the settlement up to the year 1972 manage to establish any other name than Tindirma.

On Wednesday, 23rd August 1972 the following occurred, according to witnesses: Amadou Amadou, intoxicated, drove a car, a light-blue rusted Toyota that did not belong to him, into the courtyard of the commune, which was near the souk. There, as five members of the commune concordantly reported, he initially offered to sell some unspecified service, then subsequently, over tea, made a speech about sexuality that was as explicit as it was anatomically incorrect (four witnesses), as well as starting to have a philosophical discussion about gender relations (one witness), then apparently made his way unnoticed into the kitchen where he helped himself to more alcohol, and finally, brandishing a firearm that suddenly appeared in his hand, stormed through the property searching for valuables. A stereo hi-fi system in the common room was the first thing to attract his interest, but he was unable to transport it alone. A female member of the commune, asked to carry the speakers to the car, had refused, as the stereo system wasn’t fully paid off, at which point Amadou had shot her in the face. He then shot two other communards who arrived on the scene to try to disarm him (with words?). After further search of the property (now with the weapon held out in front of him like a dog pulling on a leash), he discovered a woven rattan suitcase that was stuffed with money (paper notes of unknown currency). Amadou had forgotten everything else and attempted to flee the house with the rattan suitcase. While attempting to do so he lost a sandal when it fell down a stairwell, shot a further communard hiding in a wardrobe, and took possession of a basket filled with fruit that had been standing in the kitchen pantry. Some thirty or forty witnesses, drawn by the gunfire, had seen Amadou as he fired into the air in order to disperse the crowd, jumped into the Toyota and drove off in the direction of the coast road. Halfway to the coast, in the middle of the desert, he ran out of gas and was arrested by the fat little village sheriff, who showed up with the suspect a short time later in Polidorio’s office. Amadou was wearing just one sandal at the time of his arrest. The rattan suitcase with the money was nowhere to be found, but the basket of fruit sat on the passenger seat of the light-blue Toyota in the desert. The still-warm Mauser was in the glovebox. An empty magazine that fitted the weapon was later seized in the courtyard of the commune. A sandal was recovered in the stairwell, which was a mirror image of the one Amadou had on.

In his statements, Amadou didn’t address any of the particulars of the allegations against him. He flatly denied the whole thing. This was not unusual. In a country where a man’s word still held sway, there were in essence no confessions. The standard statement of all accused criminals in all investigations was that all allegations brought against them were fabricated and that they felt their honor deeply insulted. If the suspect or accused put in any effort to come up with their own version of events, as a rule they paid no attention to the details. Amadou was no exception. Coherently integrating the facts at hand into his fantasy version of events never crossed his mind. How did the sandal end up in the staircase of the commune? How did an empty magazine get into the yard? Why did forty witnesses say they could positively identify Amadou? Amadou shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t answer to save his life, and he didn’t understand why these questions were being asked of him of all people. Wasn’t it much more the duty of the police to answer such questions? He pointed to some electric device or other (telex, coffee machine) and begged to be hooked up to the lie detector. He swore before the true and only God, he stated that he could only say what happened in reality, and he would be happy to do so at any time. He, Amadou Amadou, had been taking a walk in the desert. The weather had been lovely, and the walk took several hours. (It wasn’t as unlikely as it might at first sound. Many oasis residents still moonlighted as smugglers.) While under way he had lost a sandal in a thorn bush. Then, near the road, he had found an abandoned, light-blue Toyota and had climbed into the unlocked vehicle because there was a basket of mouth-watering fruit on the passenger seat and he, Amadou, had toyed with the idea of eating some of the fruit since he was very hungry. This was something they could actually reproach him for, since the fruit did not belong to him. He would swear to this. At that moment, however, he was arrested and taken to Targat by a policeman who seemed to materialize out of nowhere. He didn’t know anything about a pistol in the glovebox.

This statement he repeated on four consecutive days without changing a word. Just once, on the evening of the fourth day and in a state of severe fatigue, did Amadou remark that he had tossed the rattan suitcase out of the window during the escape; he recanted this sentence after just a few minutes and later wouldn’t admit to having said it at all. Didn’t want to say anything more unless they let him finally sleep.

And the fact that the victims were foreigners made everything infinitely more complicated. Polidorio had led the interrogation only on the first day, on the second and third Canisades made half-hearted attempts to shift the case back to Tindirma; then the Interior Minister unexpectedly intervened, and the affair was transferred to the most senior member of the staff, Karimi.

A government official had already been in the United States for a few days and was negotiating alliances and development aid when the massacre received unusually extensive coverage in the American press. In Europe as well they busied themselves with the affair, even though no Europeans were among the victims. In the capital there were uncomfortable inquiries (the French ambassador, the American ambassador, a German news magazine), and the result of it all was that Karimi and a federal prosecutor had to be stationed in a hotel in Tindirma. Officially, in order to thoroughly reinvestigate; in reality, to provide the journalists gathered there with indiscreet information about the status of things and lurid examples of the insanity of the culprit. Because the victims may have all been a bunch of drugged-up hippies who ran an anti-imperialist pot business in the desert—but as soon as things got serious, the only thing that mattered to the First World was citizenship.

Amadou was barely aware of all of this. He kept pointing to the lie detector/coffee machine, swore on the life of his father and father’s father, swore by the true and only God, called for the support of his family and king, and said that they could torture him and put screws into the soles of his feet but he would not budge one millimeter from the truth.

“Screws into the soles of the feet,” said Karimi. “These are methods that would obviously not be utilized here. In all seriousness, if we had any interest in a confession from you, we would have long since got it. I hope this is clear to you. We don’t need your feet for that. We don’t need anything for that. It’s just, who would care about it? Have you ever considered who would care about a statement from you? Have you looked at the evidence?”

Amadou shifted from side to side in his chair and grinned. Karimi turned to the lawyer: “Have you at least tried to explain this to him? A tenth of that evidence would send a man to the guillotine.” He turned back to Amadou. “Nobody gives a shit whether you talk or not. Not even the most corrupt line judge in the world would let you off. You can keep your mouth shut or you can talk. The only difference is that if you talk your family will receive a tidy corpse. Think of your mother. No, correction—naturally that’s not the only difference. The other one is that if you talk, you will be allowed to leave the room to take a piss.”

The lawyer, who had sat by silently chewing his nails almost the entire time, protested meekly. Then he asked to be able to talk to his client privately. Karimi pointed to a sofa in the corner where normally the commissars sat while they smoked.

The lawyer could have gone into another room with Amadou. Or he could have asked Karimi, Canisades and Polidorio to stand outside the door. Instead he led Amadou over to the piece of furniture some seven or eight meters away and explained to him in a hushed tone—though still clearly audible to the police—that the evidence was overwhelming and the day very hot. With a raised index finger he added that everything had already been decided before the eyes of Allah. In an earthly court, on the other hand, one could in this case neither improve things nor aggravate them with a statement, only shorten the futile and dishonorable procedure. And a man of honor, like Amadou, and so on. The man wasn’t exactly a star lawyer. He had the face of a farmer and was wearing a poorly fitting black suit with a mustard-colored handkerchief sticking out of the breast pocket like a desperate cry for help. It wasn’t entirely clear to the Commissariat where the man had managed to get hold of Amadou’s family. There was a strong suspicion that he was being paid in kind. Amadou had six or seven sisters.

“Oh, man,” said Canisades with a glance at the desk. He lit up like a little child. “Oh, man. Oh, man.”

Polidorio looked at his watch, took two aspirin out of his pocket and gulped them down dry. With his chin stretched upward he stared for a while at the ceiling fan. The accused still persisted in pantomiming his version: a walk in the desert, sandals, fruit basket, arrest. He squirmed around on the sofa, and as the lawyer repeated his argument for the third or fourth time in the manner of a primary-school teacher, Polidorio suddenly caught sight of a look from the accused that he hadn’t seen before. What was that look? It was the desperate look of a not terribly intelligent man who in this moment, during the monotonous ripples of the flood of words from his lawyer, realized that his life was over, the look of a man who despite the overwhelming burden of evidence must have thought up until a few minutes ago that there was still a chance to avoid the guillotine, a look that was not only desperate but also seemed shocked, a look of a man, thought Polidorio, who—perhaps was innocent.

He paged through the files.

“Where are the fingerprints?”

“What fingerprints?”

“From the weapon.”

Karimi unwrapped the foil from around a chocolate as he shook his head.

“We have forty eyewitnesses,” said Canisades. “And Asiz is on vacation.”

“Can’t almost anyone do it?”

“Who is almost anyone? Can you?” bristled Karimi, who was determined to return by daylight to Tindirma, where he had an appointment with a reporter from Life magazine. “Asiz can’t even do it. When he was a palace guard he spent a week pasting the place up. Then he took four hundred prints, and the only two that were recognizable were from the eight-year-old son of the janitor.”

Polidorio sighed and looked over at the lawyer, who had stopped talking.

Amadou’s head had sunk to half-mast.

6

Shakespeare

A wonderfully funny letter was sent to me signed by a fraternity in Boston, Massachusetts, medical school; the fraternity for doctors had voted me the body on which they would most like to operate.

DYANNE THORNE

HELEN WAS NEVER AWARE of the impression she made. She knew herself only from photos or the mirror. In her own estimation she looked good, even breathtaking in some of the photos. She had her life under control, without being particularly happy or unhappy, and had no troubles with men. At least no more so than her friends. Less, in fact. From the beginning of high school on she’d had seven or eight relationships, all with boys about her age, who were nice, well bred and athletic, boys for whom the intelligence of their girlfriends wasn’t of particular importance and who rarely noticed Helen’s.

Helen didn’t let it bother her. If men wanted to consider themselves intellectually superior, she wasn’t distraught. Most of the relationships didn’t last long, but as fast as they ended new ones formed. A walk across campus in a midriff-baring T-shirt and Helen had three invitations to dinner. The only question that came up from time to time was why the genuinely interesting men never approached her. She couldn’t explain it. She suffered from depression only as often as anyone else, not more. From novels she knew that the most beautiful women were also the least happy. She read a lot.

The first blow to her self-confidence came when, as she was preparing for an exam, she recorded her voice with a tape recorder. Helen listened to the recording for exactly four seconds and subsequently didn’t have the courage to press play a second time. An alien, a Tex Avery cartoon, a talking piece of chewing gum. She knew that one’s own voice could sound strange, but the tones on the tape were more than strange. At first she had even thought it possible that the machine had some sort of technical defect.

The pimply chemistry professor who had lent her the tape recorder explained that resonant bones and cavities in the head were the reason that people perceived their own voices as fuller and more melodious than they really were, and that surprise was a reasonable reaction. He himself had the falsetto voice of a castrato and was unable to keep his gaze away from Helen’s cleavage when he talked to her. She didn’t participate in any further experiments of this sort and put it out of her mind. That was during her first year at Princeton.

Helen gained entrance effortlessly and was awarded a much-sought-after scholarship. But like many first-year students she reacted with fundamental insecurity to being replanted in a world full of strangers and cliquey rituals. In her dormitory she felt more lonely than she ever had in her entire life. She hurled herself into her studies, never broke off even the most boring small talk, and went to pains to find fixed appointments to fill most nights of the week.

Through an acquaintance who was studying English literature, Helen came into contact with an amateur drama club that put on classical plays, rarely anything modern, four or five times a year. Most of the members were students, but two housewives, a former professor who liked to get naked and a young railway trackman were also part of the group. The trackman was considered the secret star. He was twenty-four years old, had the face of a matinee idol, a body like a Greek statue and—his only fault—he could not commit any lines to memory. Not least because of him, Helen spent nearly three years working on dramas of the Elizabethan age.

At first she had only small roles, later she played Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew and the title role in Dorothea Angermann. She wasn’t without talent, and she wouldn’t have been opposed to playing the shining hero once; but the best roles, it seemed to her, were awarded on the basis of experience rather than talent. Whoever had been with the company longest ended up as Desdemona.

And then they put on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It wasn’t so much that they put on the play as they mimicked the movie. The trackman shone as Paul Newman, looked jarringly similar to the role model and hobbled so coolly across the stage on his crutches that his interactions with the prompter came off as an artful part of the production. A stunning black-haired biology student in her senior year played Liz Taylor. Helen was Mae. The bigoted Mae with her bigoted family. They padded her waist to five times its size, powdered her hair gray, painted rosy cheeks beneath her high cheekbones, put her in a dress the shape and color of a potato, and to serve as the no-necked children they brought in the professor’s grandchildren, who, because in reality they had necks, were wrapped with cervical collars. Their mouths were stuffed with foam rubber and instead of speaking, the children gave consonant-less groans, much to the delight of the audience.

The assistant professor who led the group recorded the premiere on an 8mm camera. It was the first time Helen had been filmed since her first day of primary school, and at the screening of the film she had to leave the room. She went to the bathroom, took a quick glance in the mirror and threw up. She walked stiffly back to the screening room and stared just to the side of the screen for the next hour and half and listened to the monotonous rattle of the projector. The next play on the schedule was Schnitzler’s La Ronde, but before the suspense of who would play what roles was settled, she quit the theater group.

The assistant professor lamented this move. But other than him, nobody else seemed to take great note of it. Just as no one had taken note of what a thoroughly ridiculous and vacuous performance she had given on stage. In accordance with the role, of course—to be honest, in perfect accordance with the role—but played in such a convincing manner that one could scarcely believe it was even acting at all. Such facial expressions, such intonation! And nobody found it remarkable. During the final applause Helen took another look at the screen. The noise level and whistling doubled as Mae, in a grotesque cotton sack dress, took a step forward, stiltedly put her arms around two neckless monsters, and curled her mouth into an appallingly simpering smile. The last image on a rattling, spinning spool of film.

At the small party that followed, Helen drank too much wine, and her final act before she permanently quit the group was to whisper in the ear of the trackman that she was going to lay him that night. She rattled off her address and a time and left without awaiting his reaction. The fact that she had purposefully chosen such dramatic words in order to justify failure didn’t make it any better.

But it was no failure. At one in the morning, fingernails scratched on wood in the dormitory. Paul Newman had in his hand a bouquet of flowers that looked as if he’d stolen them from the cemetery, and he seemed relieved when Helen carelessly threw them in the sink and uncorked a bottle of wine. At dawn he confessed with a gulp that he had a fiancée, earned in response a shrug of the shoulders, and the two of them never saw each other again.

In a white terrycloth bathrobe Helen crept down the hall of the dormitory, climbed two sets of stairs with a heavy head and knocked on the door of her best friend, Michelle Vanderbilt. Or perhaps not her best friend but her oldest friend. Michelle and Helen had known each other since elementary school, and since the first day of their friendship there endured a strong and constant imbalance of power between the two girls.

One of the earliest, most appalling and most exemplary memories: the matter of the canary. Perhaps in the third grade, perhaps even earlier. They were sitting on the floor among all sorts of playthings when they heard a horrible scream from the next room. Michelle’s younger brother. Seconds later a small, yellow ball of feathers came hopping through the doorway to the children’s room. The head hung limply, swinging to the side. Michelle jumped up in a panic, the ball of feathers flitted sideways as if caught in a gust of wind, rolled out into the hallway, getting dangerously close to the staircase. Helen blocked its way. The little brother ran hysterically back and forth. Mrs Vanderbilt slumped in a chair as if she had fainted, stretched out her hands as if to protect herself, and screamed at Michelle and Helen: “Help him! Help him!”

Eight-year-old Helen, who had no pets and who had also never seen the bird outside of its cage before, gingerly picked it up and straightened its little head with her finger. It dropped to the side again. She suggested putting the bird in bed, or splinting its neck with a matchstick. Nobody reacted. Finally she went into the Vanderbilts’ living room and started looking through an encyclopedia. She jumped around from canary birds to medical emergencies, from broken neck and fracture to spinal cord injury. She suggested Michelle either call a doctor or call a friend who also had a bird.

In the end, Mrs Vanderbilt managed to get a veterinarian on the phone, who recommended putting the animal out of its misery. The lady of the house held the receiver out in the air, far from her ear, repeated the doctor’s words loudly, and looked around, seeking help. But no member of the family was capable of doing what was necessary, and so finally Helen took pity on the miserable creature. She swept the bird gently into a plastic bag, put both her knees on the opening, and pounded with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the three-dimensional sack until it was two-dimensional. Afterward she buried the flattened result in the yard. Mrs Vanderbilt stood crying behind the curtains.

It was a mixture of fear and wonder that Michelle felt for her new friend that day, and that remained the predominant feeling she had about Helen in subsequent years. Occasionally (and especially during puberty), in addition to this feeling of awe, a range of other, alternating feelings came along: lack of comprehension, adoration, rage, jealousy, deliberate coldness, something like compassion… and then back to awe and genuine love—all increased in intensity by the fact that the object of these conflicting feelings never seemed to notice even the slightest difference.

And so the day after the film screening was a special day for Michelle. It was the first and only day on which she saw her friend seem weak. A picture of misery in a white bathrobe shuffled into her room in need of herbal tea and attention. Overwhelmed by the opportunity, Michelle stuck the knife in the wound and twisted it: it happened to everyone, she exclaimed, everyone was appalled by his or her own voice at first, even she, Michelle, had been put off when she recently randomly heard her own voice on a tape. Admittedly, there were also the gesticulations in Helen’s case, and in conjunction with the facial expressions it was actually something that, if she was being honest… when through all the years, this look… and it was the meaning of friendship… but ultimately one got used to it. And for her, personally, now: really not a problem.

In a seminar room Michelle was no great rhetorician, but in private and in intimate conversation she could put together text blocks of formidable scale. Even when in her eyes it was only a trifle (lovesickness, failure, or the house cat being sick would have incited her more), she spoke for nearly two hours straight about what she later referred to as “the tape recorder affair”.

Helen ignored the entire contents of the dispatch and noted only its length. One cannot speak about something for two hours, she told herself, that isn’t a grave problem.

For a few months she used a dictaphone to practice speaking faster and more clearly, without success; simultaneously, in order to exorcize the stiltedness and sluggishness of her gesticulations, she sought out a form of exercise that, she assumed, would run counter to her idea of fun and to what her body might be suited for, and hit upon karate. She registered as one of two women for a course at the university and realized after four weeks that one can change a lot in life, but not certain physiological realities. Helen became stronger and more dexterous, but nothing about the nature of the way she moved changed. She was Mae in a keikogi, Mae doing yoko geri, Mae on the mat. It was a depressing time.

Despite the futility of her efforts, she did not give up on karate. When the course at the university was discontinued, she switched to a professional studio. She was the only woman there, and to her fell the unabated attention of all the other participants, almost exclusively police from a nearby academy.

By the time she finished her studies, she had two abortions behind her, held black belts in two martial arts disciplines, had dated three or four police officers, and had no idea what she should do with her life. Pronounced cheekbones and the first lines around her mouth and eyes gave her face a certain severity, which wasn’t something she’d wanted, but which was also not entirely unbefitting. She wore make-up.

“Listen to your inner voice,” advised Michelle, but in contrast to her friend, Helen could not seem to detect a voice anywhere inside her. A bourgeois existence felt alien to her, and if she had been able to compare the nature and intensity of her feelings with those of other people, something that for most twenty-five-year-olds is either not possible or only possible in a very limited way, she would have to have conceded that she was emotionally cold. Situations others reveled in connoted no more to her than an impressionistic postcard, a litter of kittens or Grace Kelly’s engagement, and an inattentive observer could have taken her for altogether passionless. But her daydreams were fraught with peculiar images. The fireman carrying two stertorous children from a burning building that collapses behind him… the pilot brandishing his cowboy hat as he sits astride an atom bomb dropping into a valley… the crucified Spartacus, lamented by Jean Simmons… please die, my love, die now… she favored heroic subjects.

7

Lundgren

No Chinaman must figure in the story.

RONALD KNOX,Ten Commandment List for Detective Novelists

AND NOW LUNDGREN had a problem. Lundgren was dead. When they pulled him by his welted shoes from a culvert in eastern Tindirma, the only thing about him that was still recognizable as European was the cut of his clothes. Children out playing had discovered the corpse, four men retrieved it. Nobody knew who the dead man was, nobody knew how he’d got to the oasis or what he wanted there, nobody missed him.

A fresh atrocity visited upon a white person, just three weeks after the massacre in the commune, caused quite a stir among the desert dwellers. With fingertips and wooden sticks they rummaged the pockets of his suit, found nothing of value—found nothing at all… and sealed the fate of his identity by dispatching the corpse back into the culvert.

An old Tuareg, who suffered from river blindness and had children lead him around using a broom handle, positioned himself at the scene of the crime for several days and, in exchange for a trifling baksheesh, a handful of pistachios or a nip of schnapps, told the gruesome story. He had topaz-blue eyes which no longer had pupils, and he squinted off into the distance, over the heads of his audience, and swore to have been out in the desert the day before the discovery of the body and to have been startled by a sinister sound. His underage attendants had chattered their teeth and trembled in fear; he, however, old fighter under Moussa ag Amastan, had easily recognized it as the sonic boom of an F-5. Correctly, for the children had immediately described to him a needle-thin vapor trail in the blue sky, out of the middle of which opened a golden parachute. This parachute and its shadow had circled each other across the face of the Kaafaahi cliffs like a pair of mating eagles; not long afterward a man in an expensive suit and on all fours had crept down from the mountain into the remains of some mud huts and disappeared, tugging the parachute behind him like a golden plow.