There was no card.
He tried to remember what he could still remember. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t remember anything at all. He remembered four men beneath a high sky. He remembered how the men had talked, how they attacked each other. He remembered a rattan suitcase full of money. And that one man, whom they referred to as Cetrois, had fled into the desert on a moped. With something the others wanted. He remembered the glaring sun and the sentence: You asshole, what if he deploys the line. Words superimposed on engine noise. Employs the design… the sign… Klein. If his convoys make the coastline. If he’s a decoy for Klein. Four men in white djellabas, a rattan suitcase, a jeep.
He struggled in vain to try to extend the little theater piece for four players back into the past. There was no beginning and no end and it floated like a tiny island in an ocean of nothingness. If he redeploys the carbine. Despoils the pipeline. Cetrois. The first faint characters on a blank piece of paper.
What else could he remember? It wasn’t four men, at first only three. Stupid men. Pleased that they had smashed somebody’s skull in with a carjack, and unable to distinguish East German money from real money. And a fourth who had a weapon and a jeep and who didn’t seem as stupid. He remembered that the vehicle they drove off in had a diesel engine. He remembered that he had heard the whacks as the car doors closed and counted them: one, two, three, four. Four whacks to the skull. Four men had climbed into an invisible jeep through four doors and driven off. Unless one of them had closed the door twice because it hadn’t closed properly the first time. In that case only three had driven off and one had been left behind to stand watch.
He remained quiet and listened for as long as he could. But the throb in his head couldn’t take the stillness. If one had stayed behind as a watchman, that person knew where he was anyway. It didn’t matter. He had to get away from here. His body wanted to flee, and his mind did too.
17
Possibilities of Descent
If someone is acting otherwise normal, he is fully criminally responsible. He could have no brain at all for all I care.
HANS-LUDWIG KRÖBER,
FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST
FOR A SECOND TIME, he attempted to get up. This time his muscles obeyed him better, and he stood up with the amazement of a man expecting unbearable pain but feeling nothing more than throbbing in his head. The physical paralysis that he had sensed during the first attempt to get up turned out to be an object that was strapped to his back. He peeled off the strap and found himself looking at the barrel of a clunky machine gun. Breechblock and trigger, the unholy trinity of the piston, stock and magazine: an AK-47. At least that’s what it said in awkward silver lettering on the stock: AK-47. But it wasn’t factory lettering. And it wasn’t an AK-47. The thing felt light and flimsy in his hand. It was actually a toy, cut from wood and painted black, carefully made and accurate down to the last detail.
He propped himself up on all fours and pushed himself upright. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and took a few halting steps across the floor. It was okay. At least that’s what he told himself as he calmly tried to breathe: It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
He peered out through the window-like opening at the front of the building. There was a drop-off of about five or six meters. He was standing in the gable window of a giant barn. There were stones below. To the left of the barn he saw a small hut on top of which laundry had been set out to dry. Beyond, the desert stretched to the horizon.
No stairs. No ladder.
He was sweating.
“My name is,” he suddenly said loudly. “My name is. My name is.” Each time he left his tongue in position after the final s in order to trigger an automatic reflex, but neither his tongue nor his lips had any idea what they were supposed to do.
He had to get down somehow. The only connection to the ground floor appeared to be the approximately three-by-three-meter hatch through which the pulley was hanging. The ground floor below was in complete darkness. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and thought he was able to make out some sort of corridor down in the depths. Somewhat lighter bands branched off from the corridor. He assumed these were partitions that divided the space into stalls or alcoves. The height of the partitions was tough to guess, as was the distance to the floor. The darkness seemed to have a similar effect to an optical illusion, allowing the floor to look alternately closer and further away. But he didn’t know how far it was either way. Though the assumption was that it dropped off here exactly as much as it did on the exterior of the barn, which was five or six meters. With his foot he shoved a bit of sand over the edge of the hatch, heard nothing for a second, then a patter in the dark.
An oily chain ran from the pulley, over large wheels, to a beam, where it was hooked to a nail. He unhooked the chain and let the heavy pulley swing back and forth, and then re-secured the chain. He didn’t trust himself to climb five or six meters down the oily chain. He stared at the attic, the hatch and the pulley for a long while and wondered for the first time how he had got up here. With the pulley? In that case someone would have to have taken him off it up here, dragged him into the corner and then found a way back down.
They probably had a ladder that they pulled away afterward. Perhaps he had climbed up here on his own and they smashed in his skull up here. Or: they had smashed his skull in down below, he had fled with his last ounce of strength into the attic, had pulled the ladder up and only then lost consciousness.
He looked around in the half-darkness but did not discover a ladder or anything else that might have been helpful. No rope. Only junk.
“My name is,” he said. “My name is.”
Would it be possible to attach a counterweight to the pulley and lower himself softly to the ground? He tried to recall the laws of physics involved. Force times force-distance, mass times mass-distance. But how long was the distance? There were two wheels, the chain ran from the top down to the lower wheel and then up and around the upper wheel. So, three—no, two sections. He needed a counterweight that weighed half as much as he did. Or a quarter? His heart raced. After he’d stared at the apparatus for a minute he was not even sure which end was supposed to hold the greater weight. And even if he made the right calculations, how was he supposed to know how much something weighed compared to him? If he used a weight that was too light he’d accelerate too quickly on the way down. If it was too heavy he’d be pulled up to the attic balcony.
He began to inspect the attic more closely. The devices on the tables, copper cauldrons and pipes. A metal tub sat on top of a stove made of stacked bricks. Apparently the sand strewn everywhere was for fire protection. He sniffed two plastic flasks that contained clear liquid. The pungent smell of high-proof alcohol.
The tables gave an impression of sturdiness. Maybe he could carefully push them through the hatch in the hope that they stacked up into a sort of platform. As he went to try to push one of the tables, something fell over, and there, beneath sand, dust and junk, the rungs of a ladder were visible. After all.
He uncovered the ladder, measured its length (five and a half strides) and came to the conclusion that if it was long enough at all, it would reach from the attic to the ground only in the most dire emergency. Gasping, he lifted the ladder at its middle and turned it like a clock hand toward the hole in the floor. The back of it caught on the beam where the pulley chain was secured. The chain came off the nail and the pulley slowly set in motion. With his head pulled down between his shoulders he watched, frozen, as gravity pulled the apparatus into the depths and it thudded down loudly below. The chain followed after it, rattling derisively as it unspooled over the upper wheel and clanked out of the picture. With a little more presence of mind he could have stopped it. And if he had dropped the ladder immediately. But now that he had the ladder, the loss of the pulley seemed bearable to him. What he was much more worried about was the noise. He didn’t budge and held his breath. But it was quiet.
Carefully he tried to push
the ladder over the edge of the hatch. When it was slightly past halfway into the abyss, the lever principle made itself obvious. He was unable to hold the shorter end against the floor and had to pull the ladder back up.
Lowering it vertically wouldn’t work either. The ceiling of the attic was too low. After two more helpless attempts it seemed to him the only chance was to push the ladder over the edge with momentum and hope it landed sort of upright. As far as his calculations were concerned, it would have to remain within a few degrees of perpendicular if it was to reach up to the edge of the hatch. If it was even going to reach at all.
Like a lab animal in an experiment trying to practice the use of tools, he rocked the ladder back and forth over its balancing point. Trial and error, mind versus matter—and suddenly the matter developed a life of its own. He had pushed it too far past the tipping point and it accelerated, dragging him forward. He frantically clutched onto the last rung.
He slammed with frightening force onto his stomach, slid dangerously over the edge, and only kept from falling because his right foot had hooked around some object, probably a table leg. He couldn’t breathe.
His right arm and an alarming amount of his upper body were hanging over the abyss. His right hand: just pain. His shoulder: even more pain. But with his last ounce of strength he held fast to the ladder with one hand and felt it dangling back and forth like a pendulum in the darkness below. Blood ran down the fingers of his right hand. The skin was ripped. He groaned and slid a few more centimeters forward into the abyss, and the pendulum grazed the floor and stood still. He wrestled the ladder straight upright.
Now it was standing up. There were about forty centimeters between the top edge of the stringer and the bottom of the attic floor. He shifted his left hand to the top of the stringer, waved his hurt right hand in the air and breathed deeply.
Of course, if this ladder was too short, what good was it? It was obviously not the ladder he had used to get upstairs. There must have been a second ladder that someone else had pulled down… He suddenly froze with fright. What if the other person hadn’t climbed back down? What if he was hiding up here somewhere? He hadn’t looked at every corner of the attic. He peered around frantically, rolling his head here and there, and his gaze fixed on the window at the front of the building. And suddenly something occurred to him: there.
If he had pushed the ladder out of the window, it would have leaned against the outside wall of the barn. Maybe he had even come in that way. He tried determinedly to pull the ladder up again by the top rung. He could just barely lift it, and the effort pressed all the air out of his lungs. But when he tried to grab the second rung his body started to slide forward. He quickly lowered the ladder back down to the ground and lay there panting.
Two additional attempts were equally unsuccessful. He could have just let the ladder fall. But he’d already made one mistake and didn’t want to make a second. He decided to wait and hold the stringer at least until a better idea occurred to him.
The first thing that crossed his mind was to somehow secure the ladder. Maybe he could take off his djellaba and try to loop it around the top rung and tie it to something.
He grabbed at his collar and realized that beneath the djellaba he was wearing a checkered suit. At least that explained why he was sweating so much. But why was he wearing a suit under his djellaba? While he was still considering how best to remove the piece of clothing while lying down, he heard a quiet burble. It was the burble of water. The squeak of a water spigot. And a human voice. Like someone talking quietly to himself. It came from outside the barn.
Muffled steps beneath the window at the front. A clacking sound and a gossamer thread of light entered the ground floor. As if someone had opened a door a crack. Rattling breath, then silence, then an earthquake of a coughing fit. The fit of coughing receded again and water burbled anew somewhere. He heard slurping and rattling breathing. The spigot squeaked as it was turned off.
He couldn’t let go of the ladder now without attracting attention to himself. But he also couldn’t lie there. Desperation left him willing to try something. With his left hand still holding the ladder, he turned himself on his stomach and swung his left leg into the abyss and felt around for the top rung. It was surprisingly close and he put his foot down, not on it but on the second rung. Then he carefully let go of the stringer. He could keep the ladder upright by pressing down on it with his foot. He swung his right foot over the edge and onto the second rung as well. He didn’t have a plan for what he was doing, just an intention that came to him in a panic. He let his body down centimeter by centimeter, clamped a foot like a hook beneath the second rung and felt with the other for the third. When both feet were on the third rung, his hips were already below the level of the attic floor.
One hand on the edge of the hatch, one on the ladder, he wobbled down three more rungs. Then that was it. With the next step he would have to let go of the edge of the hatch. It was still several meters to the floor. He looked down. Twelve, fifteen rungs. The rattling sound was approaching from outside.
He straightened the ladder again, took a deep breath, then let go of the edge of the attic floor and climbed into the depths with ape-like speed. He managed four or five more rungs by alternately sticking his seat out idiotically and then jerking himself back close to the ladder, accompanied by unreal groans from his own mouth. Circus act: the clown, not the high-wire artist. Then the ladder began to tilt precariously and he managed just one more rung before his foot stepped into the void. As he was falling he pushed the ladder away and then crashed to the ground on his back. The ladder thudded down only a few centimeters to the side of him. Dust swirled up. Walls made of strips of wood, metal canisters, sand, a chain, a screeching sound. Light through an open door. In the door Poseidon, god of the sea, with a flowing beard and a trident.
Correction: a fellah with a pitchfork.
He had no time to consider what part of his body hurt the most. His bones seemed intact. He staggered to his feet, put an innocent look on his face and tapped two fingers on his forehead as a greeting: Good day.
The trident was lowered.
He thought he could make out an old, boozy face backlit above the beard, and he tried out a sentence that could be an excuse as well as an accusation: “I was up there.” He pointed to the scene of the crime and wondered to himself how he was going to get past the trident.
Both men simultaneously took a step toward the other. Either the fellah was blind or he was badly cross-eyed. A white film covered one of his eyes, and the other stared somewhere into the dark of the barn. Then the trident swung in the direction of his gaze, and a ghastly rattle, very different from the earlier one, came from the throat of the fellah.
His opposite number turned to see what the fellah was looking at. Next to junk and machine parts, between the walls of a stall, lay a man in a white djellaba, his limbs oddly contorted. Atop his crushed head lay the pulley block with the heavy metal hook. The oily chain was coiled in blood and brain matter. The trident moved into the picture. It didn’t seem like the right moment to explain amnesia to the man. A fresh body, four armed men in a jeep, a crazy-looking fellah with a pitchfork: the situation was confusing. He pushed aside the pitchfork and ran. Ran through the barn door, past the hut and into the desert. And ran.
18
Beneath Dunes
Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
With all foliage underground.
SALINGER
THE DIRECTION WAS DICTATED by the barn door: straight ahead in a direct line away from the buildings. He ran up a dune, stumbled, threw himself over the crown. Slid fifteen meters down, sprinted across the trough of the wave and stomped up the next lee side. The lee sides of the dunes were steep; one sank up to the knees. The windward side was flat and firm. Going the other direction would have been easier, but it would also have been easier for his pursuer.
He looked back: nobody was following him. Completely out of breath already, he w
ent more slowly. Some distance away was a slanting row of poles, perhaps telegraph poles, a road. He headed that way and heard a humming from somewhere. At first it was like the buzz in one’s own ears, but he didn’t indulge in any illusions. It was the noise of an approaching diesel engine. More than likely they hadn’t managed to catch Cetrois and now they wanted him. Or they had caught Cetrois. And wanted him in addition.
He ran. Twenty or thirty wave troughs away the jeep jumped over a dune, hung for a second with all four wheels in the air and dropped out of view, its engine wailing.
Crouching down, he took a sharp left into a serpentine wave trough, picked up a fist-sized rock in stride and let it go again. What did he want with it? To knock the revolver out of their hand with it? The afternoon sun burned on his face. He stood still. He panted. He retraced ten of his own footsteps and then turned to look back: absurd, the difference was immediately obvious. The engine noise rose and fell in the rhythm of the waves of sand. In a sudden fit of rash panic, he scrambled up a dune and then tumbled back down the same side and looked at the results. Then he ran back and forth through the entire trough and a small adjoining trough until they were covered on every side with trails.
Two flat slabs of rock stood in the sand next to each other as if in a toaster. In their slipstream a deep trench had formed. He threw his body into it, his head between the slabs of rock, and shoveled sand onto his legs and torso. He burrowed his arms sideways into the ground. It wasn’t difficult to make little avalanches of sand pour down on himself from the slanted sides of the trench. Finally he rotated his head back and forth between the rock slabs. He felt his head wound open; the pain was phenomenal. Sand fell in his face from above and trickled into his ears. The sound of the diesel engine fell silent. All he could hear was his own wheezing. He held his breath and squinted. His torso seemed entirely covered. Beyond the sand on top of his body he saw the wave trough, the flank of the dune on the other side, and the telltale footprints all around. His field of vision was severely limited by the slabs of rock. On the other hand, his face was only visible if one stood directly in front of him. But it was still visible.
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