Sand by Wolfgang Herrndorf

Author:Wolfgang Herrndorf [Wolfgang Herrndorf]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781782272816
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2017-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

37

The High Priestess

I have no feeling for feminine virtues, for a woman’s happiness. Only that which is wild, great, shining appeals to me.

KAROLINE VON GÜNDERRODE

“NOT A MINE, because there’s no mine here. Not landmines, because no reasonable person on earth would kidnap a family and threaten them with death over ten or twenty dollars. And to round out the improbable, a fortress beneath which mines were dug is also out,” said Helen with a crooked smile. “Because there are none. Assuming the guy with the scars didn’t tell you any bullshit, which seems to be the case. So the only thing left is a mine as in pencil lead.”

“Or the coin. Or the book.”

“Isadora Mine? And her son Aimable-Jean-Jacques? No. I don’t buy that.”

“What if it’s not the book but something hidden in the book?”

“I still don’t buy it,” said Helen. “Not because a book can’t be valuable. But because Bassir said mine. Seventy-two hours and I’ll have the mine back. A barely literate idiot who spent hours twisting a letter-opener in your hand wouldn’t say mine if he meant a book. He would say book. Same with the coins. He would say coins if he meant coins. Maybe we’d be better off concentrating on Cetrois.”

“How can we do that if we don’t even know where to look?”

Helen stood up with a shrug, went over to the phone and arranged a long-distance call to America. While she was waiting to be connected, Carl gathered up all the things he’d had with him in the desert and placed them on the table in front of him. The empty wallet. The crumpled tissue. The ring of keys. The pencil.

The pencil was six-sided and coated in a shiny green lacquer. Embossed in gold print at the top of it was 2B. The tip was broken; a thin sliver of wood was peeling away.

“Forget it,” said Helen.

“Just a moment,” said the telephone operator.

Carl put down the pencil and picked up the wallet, examining the empty compartments but finding only grains of sand. He put it back down next to the pencil. He unfolded the tissue out of which sand also trickled, stared at it, then balled it up again. A few minutes went by. Then he stood up, grabbed a breadknife from the kitchen and began to cut the pencil. Helen watched him, shaking her head. As the stub got shorter he pressed it down with the heel of his hand and kept sawing at it with the knife until there was nothing more left than a pile of thin wood shavings and crumbs of graphite that he stared at pensively but which held no secrets.

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Helen when she saw him tap his finger in the graphite dust and then taste it with the tip of his tongue.

Suddenly the phone line was dead. Helen banged on the cradle and after the operator also didn’t respond for several minutes she got up and said to Carl: “I have to buy something else.

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