Herrndorf Sand

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78227-281-6
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten

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.

Born in 1965, Wolfgang Herrndorf waited until 2010 to make his literary breakthrough with Why We Took the Car, which has sold more than two million copies in Germany, has been translated into thirty-four languages, and was made into a feature film. By this time he was already suffering from an incurable brain tumour. He continued to write for the next few years, completing Sand, which won the 2012 Leipzig Book Fair prize. When he died in 2013 he was recognized as a unique and brilliant literary talent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Herrndorf, Wolfgang

Weitere Mitwirkende

Mohr, Tim

Leseproben

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...