Sand Read online

  WOLFGANG HERRNDORF

  SAND

  Translated by Tim Mohr

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  BOOK ONE

  The Sea

  BOOK TWO

  The Desert

  BOOK THREE

  The Mountains

  BOOK FOUR

  The Oasis

  BOOK FIVE

  The Night

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  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

  A TOP 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 tenni
s 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.