He breathed deeply, closed his eyes and rotated his head back and forth again. Another load of sand slid down over his forehead to his cheekbones, dusting his eyelids, cheeks and the corners of his mouth like powdered sugar. He had only a very rough impression as to how much of his face was still uncovered. Probably his chin and the tip of his nose. But he couldn’t turn his head any more now. With a little puff he blew a few grains of sand out of his nose and waited.
An image of the just-seen dunes beneath the bright sun lingered on the insides of his eyelids. The dunes light and covered by the ripple pattern caused by the wind, a pattern that was reminiscent of the whorls of a giant brain, the sun a black ring with a light hole in the middle. Perhaps the last thing he would see in his life. If they discovered his hiding place, silently approached him and put a few bullets into the ground between the slabs, he wouldn’t even have seen his murderers. The engine noise returned. Approached. Receded. It sounded as if they were turning. Suddenly he sensed light tremors. A fine mist of sand splashed onto the sand on his feet. He heard shouts. Apparently they were driving at high speed around the same trough he was lying in. He didn’t flinch. He tried not to breathe. As the noises fell silent, he didn’t know whether they had driven off or had got out to search for him on foot.
The silence went on for minutes.
Three minutes. Or ten. He could tell how uncertain his sense of time was and began to count his heartbeats. His heart was beating wildly. In his mind’s eye he saw the sand over the left side of his chest hopping traitorously like it was on a drum. Hundred beats a minute. Approximately. After 150 beats he thought he heard a muffled squeak, but he wasn’t sure. The sand in his ears itched horribly.
He continued to count in order to measure the time, to calm himself down and to concentrate: 199, 200. He couldn’t rid himself of the idiotic notion that his exhalations would produce a pattern in the sand beneath his nose and give him away.
He counted to 300, 400, 500. At 3,200 the engine noise returned, but very faintly. This time they didn’t get close to him. He counted to 6,000, he counted to 12,000. And did not move. The throbbing in the back of his head got stronger and stronger. His entire body pulsed. The whole time as he counted number after number he had the feeling that someone was standing directly over him with a pistol drawn, waiting out of spite. Waiting until he opened his eyes to blast him into a sandy grave with a smile. He counted to 15,000. It had been 12,000 heartbeats, so about 120 minutes, without any noise. He stuck out his bottom lip, blew air over his face and tried to blink. The narrow view between the rock slabs showed the trough churned up by car tracks and the dune on the far side of the trough beneath a glass-blue evening sky. On the crest of the dune stood something staring at him with two little button eyes. Piercing, emotionless, interested in an absurd way. A short-legged, furry animal, no bigger than a fennec. It had reddish-gold fur; two incisors stuck up from its tiny lower jaw. The animal looked around, squeaked and trotted off.
19
The Quarter Character
Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.
NIXON
HE HAD BARELY REACHED the dirt road beneath the telegraph poles when he saw a dust cloud on the horizon. He crept behind a dune until he could be sure it wasn’t the jeep approaching. It was a white Fiat 500, a leg hanging out of the left side. He jumped up, ran back out to the road and waved with both arms. Through the windshield he could make out two occupants, light-skinned young men with long hair and bare chests. They were snaking toward him and swerved around him, gaping with wide eyes. And continued on at a walking pace.
He ran after the car and tried to yell his tale of woe into the open passenger door window. The passenger had opened his mouth, pulled his upper lip up to his nose and held his hand to his ear like he was deaf. He yelled: “What? I said, What? You are an amazing sprinter! But—what? What men? Slow down, he’s out of breath. Not too slow. Now come on, you must know what kind of men! And now you’re just wandering around here? He says he’s not just wandering around… no, he’s not just wandering around! You want a sip of beer? No offense, we’re Christians. But at least he speaks English. Seriously, you’re the first person who can speak English. All the kaffirs—pardon my French. But how do you see this working? I mean, look at the back seat. Yeah, isn’t it about life and death for us all? Of course I understand that. But you have to understand us. The rule of the desert. Suppose you have a knife under your frock? Of course not! Nobody who wanted to slit someone’s throat would admit in advance that he had a knife under his frock. But I say, better safe than sorry. And when someone is running around out here talking about not knowing who he is or where he’s going and with his head all bashed in—I mean, what is the story, man? I’m not buying it. Are you buying it? Slow down. Sip of beer?”
They rolled along beside him in first gear. At one stage he reached for the held-out beer but it was pulled away. Finally, exhausted and completely out of breath, he stopped and watched as the Fiat quietly creaked away. Fifty meters. And then it, too, stopped. The driver got out, stretched and waved. Shimmering heat separated his arm from his body, his feet hovered twenty centimeters above the ground. Eventually the passenger also got out. He unzipped his pants, pissed in the sand and talked over his shoulder to driver. They laughed. Then they waved again.
Reason told him that they only wanted to make an ass of him. They would probably get back in and drive off as soon as he caught up with them. But oddly enough, something made him think for some reason that these were friends of his.
The expression on their faces was so oddly attentive and at the same time cheerful and open that he couldn’t shake the feeling that they must be old friends or acquaintances of his who didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. Either that or they were lunatics. But they didn’t really look like lunatics. Hesitantly he approached the two of them. The hope and the wish that they might be his friends became so overwhelming that it spilled out of him.
“Do we know each other? We know each other!” he called.
“Yeah,” said the passenger, pulling on a tie-dye T-shirt. “For ages. But are you serious? You don’t know who you are?”
He nodded.
“And how long have you not known?”
“For a few hours.”
“Do you not have a wallet?”
He hadn’t thought of that. He reached under his djellaba and felt the back pocket of his suit. Unbelievable. A wallet. He lifted the djellaba so he could get the wallet out, and when he looked up again there was a switchblade knife pointed at his eye. The passenger took the wallet out of his hand.
“If we help you and take you with us, you have to help us out a bit, too. Gas and whatnot. That okay with you? Share the expenses a little?” He opened the wallet, which contained a bundle of notes and cards of various colors, took out the notes and threw the rest into the sand. His buddy smiled. He had giant pupils.
“Well, well, well. Looks good. I suggest we go get gas straight away, drop off some stuff. And then we’ll come back. You wait here, okay? Maybe you can clean yourself up a bit in the meantime. You look like a pig.”
“I think he’s lost more than his memory, he seems to be having more and more trouble talking, too.”
They turned his head this way and that at knifepoint and then the driver ordered him to crawl around on all fours and squeal like a pig. He crawled around on all fours and squealed like a pig. One of them asked why this was so easy for him, and the other asked whether the Arabs didn’t consider pigs impure. They didn’t have a lot of imagination. They gave him a kick in the side and finally went back to the car. The driver started the car, the passenger put one foot on the running board, held the knife and banknotes indecisively in his hand and looked around.
Out of fear that they might change their minds and hurt him badly or even kill him, he called out: “You can ta
ke the money!”
That was a mistake.
The passenger seized on it first. “We can take the money!” he said. He came back, beaming, picked up the wallet and watched the reaction of the man kneeling on the ground and pressing his hand against the pain in his side. He took the papers out of the wallet and studied them with the enthusiastic lack of understanding of a first grader who had just learned to read. A white card, a green card, a red card. Two rows of white American teeth and a whole bunch of gums were bared. As he read his smile slowly stiffened and then froze, his mouth still open. Appalled, he handed the red card to the driver and said: “Oh, my god.”
The driver had a look at it, looked around baffled and then also said: “Oh, my god.”
And then down toward the ground: “We didn’t know! We are sorry. If only we had known who you were!”
“We wouldn’t have attacked you!”
“Superman! We attacked Superman!”
“You said it, oh, my god. Superman!”
“The super brain with super strength!”
“And super squeals! Eh, man. We’re doomed!”
They found themselves incredibly funny. They tried out another string of jokes with super dirty, super dummy and super piggy, and then the passenger pulled out a lighter and held it beneath the ID card. The blue flames moved very slowly up the tough paper. The last scrap fell from his hand, he waved his arm in the air and blew on his fingertips. Both the white and the green cards burned more readily. Then the order to crawl around on all fours and squeal in the direction of Mecca was repeated. Finally they got into the car and drove off.
With a lunge he grabbed the last smoldering scrap of the red ID paper, a tiny piece from which trembling bits of ash fell. He held it between the fingernails of his thumb and forefinger, and, as if in the capriciousness of fortune there were a sort of logic and malice, it was the part of the card on which “Name:” stood.
Name, colon and a quarter of a letter, an upward squiggle. Then the last ember consumed the squiggle. The letter had been rounded up and to the left, perhaps a C or an O. Dark-red ink on red paper. He looked at the horizon, where the dust cloud hung above the road. Then again at his sooty fingertips. The squiggle had turned into ash. But he had seen it. He now knew his name began with a C or an O. Or with an S. S was also possible. Whether it was his first or last name he did not know.
He walked along the road. For a long time no cars came past. He took off the djellaba, looked at the thin trail of blood on the back and then buried the piece of clothing in the sand. When the next dust cloud appeared on the horizon, he hid too late. A dark Mercedes drove past, honking. After that, as a precaution, he walked in the dunes, parallel to the road but at some distance from it. The going was difficult, but the fear was killing him. At the top of each dune he kept a lookout. His wound throbbed, and he wrapped his undershirt around his head. He had long since inspected the rest of the contents of his suit: in the jacket he’d found a ring with seven keys, four safety keys, two normal ones, a car key. In addition, a used tissue and in the inside pocket a green pencil with a broken tip.
As he walked he recalled names with the first letters of C, O and S and was surprised how easily they came to him. Dozens of names came to mind with no effort at all, though not a single one seemed tied to any memories. Claude, Charles, Stéphane. Cambon, Carré, Serrault. Ogier. Sassard. Sainclair. Condorcet. Ozouf. Olivier. It was as if the names were written by an invisible hand and passed to him on an invisible tray. Perhaps they were names that everyone knew, not connected to any particular person. Or perhaps he had known a person connected to each name, which was why they all triggered the same reaction in him: nothing. He wondered how he even knew there was such a thing as memory loss. In what life had he learned that?
Then the letter Q occurred to him.
From the next cloud of dust on the horizon came the sound of a diesel engine. He threw himself onto his stomach in the sand. Quineau, Quenton. Schlumberger. Quatremère. Chevalier. The stream of names didn’t stop.
Next the letter G occurred to him, and he had a fit of rage. He kneeled and wrote out the alphabet with his finger in the sand, to make sure he hadn’t overlooked any more letters. C, G, Q and S. That was it. He staggered onward. If he annoys the hardline, he doesn’t fall in line, delays the power line, if he destroys… The sun burned hot over the Sahara.
20
In the Land of the Ouz
Female Nines frequently mistype as Twos.
EWALD BERKERS
HELEN HELD THE PHONE to her ear for several minutes without saying a word. When all she could hear at the other end was sobbing, she asked: “Shall I come anyway?”
Around noon she found the car rental place that the receptionist at the Sheraton had described to her. At least that was the word she had used: car rental place. One could also have said junk yard. An oxcart and a rusty Honda pickup were the only vehicles in the yard, surrounded by piles of worn parts.
In a plywood hut sat a thirteen-year-old boy slumped in front of a shisha. The presence of a blonde woman temporarily revived him. He hopped up, made expansive gestures and spoke to her in a strange, quaint accent. What he was trying to get across, however, was less pleasing. The Honda was broken down and Helen did not wish to rent the oxcart (which included oxen and a driver), and the questions as to when a car would be available or how many cars they even owned the boy answered only with a shake of the head. Helen inquired about other car rentals in the area and learned that limousines could be hired at the airport. The likelihood of getting a car there without a reservation, however, was about nil.
“And what’s wrong with that one?” Helen pointed out of the window.
Slow shaking of the head, coupled with raised eyebrows. The boy led Helen out, sat in the pickup and turned the ignition key. Clicks came from under the hood of the Honda.
“Mechanic coming. Probably. Two weeks.”
Helen made another attempt to find out how many cars the place had, received just as little of an answer as before, and asked instead for tools. Beneath his table the boy had a set of crooked wrenches, pliers, a hammer, brushes. Helen carried it all out to the Honda. For a while the boy felt compelled to stand nearby slowly shaking his head, but in the end he couldn’t bear to watch any more and went back inside his hut. A woman. A blonde woman! He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. He scrounged up charcoal, Nakhla tobacco and matches. Lit the shisha, and blew smoke out of the little window into the yard.
Now and then he heard American curses escape from under the propped-open hood, he heard banging on metal, the quiet click of the ignition switch in the midday heat, and then, as the coals in his shisha were already spent, engine noise. Shortly afterward the oil- and dirt-smeared woman came into the hut. She threw the tools on the table, took out her wallet and said in a tone so blasé as not to be outdone: “I need it for a week. How much?”
As far as Helen knew, there was a short, unsafe route and a long, safe route to the dirt road to Tindirma. She had time. For kilometers on end she followed the main road north to the foot of the mountains, where the city thinned out and a solitary sign marked the turn. The road went through dry vegetation for a few hundred meters. After sand dunes with salt-resistant plants there followed sand dunes with no salt-resistant plants, and the entrance to the desert was marked by a huge, geometric sculpture of two camels made out of clay bricks, the muzzles of which met high in the air above the dirt road.
Even if one had never seen the desert before, it got boring quickly. It was the time of the greatest midday heat, and Helen didn’t encounter another vehicle. Here and there were car wrecks sunken in the sand like dead insects, eroded down to the bare metal and with their doors open like wings.
After two hours she reached a gas station with one single pump. The oasis of Tindirma was just beyond.
Helen tried exactly twice to exit the car in the oasis. Even though she had on jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt, she caused a stampede both times. Men, boys a
nd old men came running at her with their arms outstretched in front of them. She had a headscarf somewhere in the car but didn’t want to wear it in the midday heat. She supposed the situation wasn’t going to get any better. She gave up on her plan to have a look around on her own for the time being.
The little street with the commune wasn’t hard to find from the souk. Helen recognized the plaque on the door from the description over the phone and she drove the Honda into the courtyard. A fluffy bearded man in a tie-dyed tunic opened the door. He repeated the name Helen Gliese, looked her in the eyes for twenty seconds and pushed his jaw from side to side before he let her in.
The building had been furnished in the same plush and padded style as normal Arab residences, and the first thing that struck Helen were the notes. Notes everywhere. Fluffy beard closed up behind her and barred the door with four locks, and at the same moment Michelle fell down the stairs into the inner courtyard with a scream. She flung her arms around Helen’s neck and wouldn’t stop sobbing. With his arms folded behind his back, fluffy beard stood nearby and watched the two women’s greeting as if he were looking at a complicated car wreck. He was silent, Michelle sobbed, and over her shoulder Helen read the writing on one of the notes that was hanging next to the cloakroom: The watcher is the watched.
Michelle pushed her childhood friend an arm’s length away and scanned her with a glazed look, then pulled her back to her, sobbing. She was so worked up that she couldn’t say anything for a long time, and when she was able to speak again she said: “Asthma spray.” She ran back up the stairs. Fluffy beard took his hands out from behind his back, raised them slowly to the height of his armpits, began to do stretching exercises and said: “It’s not asthma. It’s psychological.”
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