MEIKE ZIERVOGEL

PEIRENE PRESS

This is Peirene’s first book narrated by an ape. Animal fables are usually not my thing. It needed Belgian deadpan humour to convince me otherwise. Mixing Huxley’s Brave New World with Orwell’s Animal Farm, the fastpaced plot leaves behind images that play in your mind long after you have closed the book.

Contents

1. Title Page

2. The Man I Became

3. Acknowledgements

4. About the Author and Translator

5. Copyright

There was a time when I couldn’t even talk. Perhaps I learned to talk and write like a man who can’t stop tinkering with the things he has found on the street. The construction grows larger, and more and more fantastical, until one day he just gathers up his clothes and toothbrush and moves in.

Now that this story has been completed, I realize I didn’t write it seeking forgiveness – life itself forgave me long ago – but because the emotions belong to everyone: the sorrow, the longing, even the happiness. And what is happiness anyway? Perhaps, after finishing the story, the reader, like me, will witness the way the evening sun can sink through a woman. The glow on the face of a woman that allows us to see the sun long after it has set – I come from a family who value things like that. Stay sitting where you are a little longer to wait for the stars, which will appear like embers years after the fire has gone out. That too is a miracle.

I don’t know exactly when – I still couldn’t think in terms of days and years, that’s how long ago it was – but the heat made us so drowsy that we nodded off and slept whole afternoons away in a heap, spread-eagled on top of each other. We caught termites by pushing long twigs, as flexible as blades of grass, into their mounds and then licking the twigs clean. We risked being trampled underfoot to steal ostrich eggs out of the nest by running a few steps and then dropping to the ground so the surprised bird could no longer see us and would wander off to find out where we had got to. The sunsets were grandiose, so colourful and intoxicating that, sated with shoots and pith, we gathered in a tree to watch, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, drinking in the reds, purples and oranges with our eyes.

As was the custom in our family, we youngsters had gone out into the world together. We hung from branches one-handed to show off our muscles. We felt like princes and princesses. We were young and beautiful and our bliss was never going to end.

*

While we were picking berries, one of us disappeared. We thought he was playing a joke on us. When the joke went on too long, we forgot him. When the second disappeared, we remembered and grew restless. By the third disappearance we were panicking. Our certainties had been snatched away. We couldn’t trust our own shadows. Without stopping to make a plan, we fled, directionless. Our enemy was unknown. We didn’t even know if there was an enemy. All we knew was that somebody who was right in front of us could disappear a minute later without trace, without a sound. Every time someone disappeared, we caught that same scent of musk and flowers.

The realization sank in: this wasn’t going to stop.

Only later did it occur to me that those who were left were the skinny ones, the least interesting. My younger brother had a wound on his stomach; I was not yet fully grown. But eventually I too disappeared. One moment I was under a tree and quietly creeping up a hill to get a view of the plain, the next I felt something heavy falling onto my back, a sharp prick in my neck. Everything around me went black. I couldn’t move.

In that blackness I found the others. We could only smell and feel and hear each other. We couldn’t reach out or embrace. We were squeezed in, blindfolded, our wrists and ankles bound, but now and then, for a few stolen seconds, we could lay a head on a shoulder. And those seconds were enough to bear the lashes that followed.

Soon after my disappearance the journey began. They removed our blindfolds and – before we’d had a chance to adjust to the glaring light and with remnants of the poison they’d used to drug us still in our veins – the horse set off. A rope tied to its tail led to the wrists of the first, who was roped in turn to the wrists of the next in line, who was roped in turn to the wrists of the next in line, and so on… As long as everyone kept in step it was fine, but the moment someone stumbled or hesitated, the horse felt a stabbing pain in its tail and let fly with its sharp hooves.

*

We walked in the heat of the day from sunrise to sunset. When we came to a waterhole they let the horses drink first and then gave us a few minutes. The food – something dry that tasted of maize – was thrown down in a heap and we had to kneel forward, wrists tied, and fish it up out of the sand with our lips. If we made the slightest sound, the whips hissed.

We are a tough family. We keep going. If we don’t get up, it can only mean we’re dead. When someone from another family fell and stayed lying there, a rider jumped off his horse, cut the rope without a word and tied it to the wrists of whoever was marching behind them. Don’t stop to think! And definitely don’t look back! So far, no one from our family had been left behind. We learned to breathe in a certain rhythm to keep step with each other and at the same time our breathing became our way of secretly talking to each other, whispering encouragement.

Hungry, thirsty, hot and hurting – our wrists and the soles of our feet swelled. I felt so much like lying down on the ground and never getting up again.

How do you survive something like that? By grabbing what you can. Every drop of water, every grain of maize counts. If someone falls? Step over them, eyes closed. Don’t grieve, grieving takes energy. At most you think: when somebody doesn’t get up, there’s more food for me. Don’t look further than the feet in front of you. Otherwise you will see something glimmering in the distance and, with every new step, that glimmer moves forward and you start thinking you’ll never touch that glimmer no matter how long you live. Put your left foot in front of your right foot and your right foot in front of your left. And again.

During our journey through the desert we sometimes saw branches like bleached ribs sticking up out of the sand, carcasses of camels, tapestries unravelled by sun, sand and wind. We weren’t the first to come this way. The nights cooled us off but also brought snakes and scorpions. The riders knew the desert, they wrapped cloth around their heads so that only their eyes were exposed and used charcoal to smear black around their eyelids to temper the sunlight. They slept in the saddle, leaning against their horse’s neck so they would feel the slightest movement of anyone tugging on the rope.

I hardly heard the riders speak during the journey, until the morning one pointed at the sky. Immediately the horses lay in a circle, covered by sheets of canvas. We were allowed to lie down inside the circle. For protection from the sharp grains of sand. It was the first time I thought we were valuable. When the storm passed they forced us to start marching again straight away. We had sand everywhere – in our hair, in our ears and in our mouths. There were riders with two rifles each on their backs who usually galloped ahead and behind us. One of them came to walk alongside our family. Suddenly he leapt from his horse and grabbed our rope. Someone had tried to gnaw through the fibres during the sandstorm. The rider didn’t say a word. With a curved knife he cut the rope and attached it to the wrists of the next in line. I walked on with my head bowed. I saw out of the corner of my eye how sharp the blade was: two quick slashes and both Achilles tendons were cut through. Nothing else. The horses walked on. I couldn’t help it, my knees buckled as if they had been my Achilles tendons. A shock passed through the group, but everyone immediately regained their senses. We all breathed a little louder. Those in front and behind me pulled the rope tighter, so that I was being carried, not dragged. The rider came to ride alongside me – he smelt of musk and flowers. He pulled the cloth off his head, but only to give me a better view of his smile. He rode next to me and bent forward, right in front of my nose. His smile. I started walking again. The rider held the mouth of his water skin under one of my eyes, as if to catch my tears.

After our journey through the desert we reached the sea. I had never seen anything like it, a new desert but blue, made of water and stretching away out of sight. We followed the horses onto a ship for our second trip. Finally no longer marching. Our group tried to stick together. The girls were separated from the boys. In the ship’s hold we had just enough room to squat down.

During the voyage we got to know the sea: as if you were lying in a massive treetop on a mild summer’s night and now and then a storm rose to shake you until you wanted to puke up your insides. When you licked your lips, you tasted salt. It stank horribly of faeces, sweat and rotten meat. We squatted down and held each other up shoulder to shoulder. Even when one of us passed out.

From where we were locked up I could see the night sky, but not the sunset. I looked around in the dark and saw that I wasn’t the only one with his face turned up to the stars. Twinkling eyes, teeth catching the light.

Men with sticks patrolled the gangway. They didn’t hit you on the face or belly, but on the soles of your feet. So as not to cause wounds that would leave scars. But I only realized that later.

One day we saw birds. From then on the men wrapped the sticks in cloth. And started hitting less hard. And then they stopped hitting us altogether. They sang songs that are sung around campfires in the desert, songs that made our hearts shrink. We inched closer together. As if invisible arms had wrapped around us.

Some of us had to stay below while they took me and others up on deck to hose us down with seawater. The fresh air and sunlight made my head spin. In the distance we saw land – a glimmer. Dozens of big white birds circled over us, screeching. We stood in lines on deck waiting for night to fall and the land in the distance glimmered even brighter, as if thousands of stars had come down to earth.

The guards were now holding burning torches instead of sticks. When one of us succumbed – collapsing from having stood there so long – they tossed him back down into the hold. I heard the thud and realized who they were, the ones who had to stay below: they were the weak, the sick, the ones who hadn’t made it, who would never set foot on land. For a second, I swayed unsteadily. A raised torch appeared in front of me. A man stared into my eyes. I felt a drop of sweat run down my head and neck, and further down my back. But I didn’t budge. I could have stood there a year without blinking. Whether the tears ran down my cheeks or not, I would stay standing there until the ship’s engines started up again and it finally delivered me to the New World.

We sailed into the New World at night. The ship docked. We heard knocking. Only when the enormous lights turned on did we see the hundreds of people behind the glass walls. Their mouths opened and closed, but we couldn’t hear what they were shouting. Or were they laughing? Why were they waving? Were they angry? We couldn’t hear them through the thick glass, we could only hear their hands slapping the glass. Some of us hunched down, trying to make ourselves invisible. Flashes of light on all sides. And among all those red faces, all those gaping mouths, I saw – and will remember for ever – the face of a girl. She looked straight into my eyes, and hers were gleaming. And on her lips I saw the sweetest, quietest, most delicate smile.

They drove us off the deck. I glanced over my shoulder and stumbled, but still tried to catch one last glimpse. Instead I stared into the face of a man holding a torch in his raised hand. The next instant a blow that made me gasp for breath landed on my back.

Our education began in the very first minute. Unerringly we were plucked out of the chaos, family by family, genus by genus. Our group was made up of ten specimens. We followed each other through a narrow corridor. First we were shaved and after that warm water sprayed down from the ceiling. I saw our hair gather like coats over the grilles in the floor. One at a time we were pushed into the next corridor where we were blown dry. At the end of the corridor we were given ten seconds to pull on our first ever item of clothing.

A voice said, ‘Once!’

It took a while to arrange ourselves in a line that allowed us all to see him.

‘Once,’ said the voice, ‘I was… like you.’

Standing before us was a human. In a suit. The human curled his lips, then immediately reverted to a serious expression.

‘And one day…’ the human said, ‘you will be like me.’

He nodded and studied us each in turn.

‘If you fail, you will become… like him.’

In the corner of the room there was a – how can I put it? – a… thing. It was only when the thing raised itself up that we saw that it looked like us. I mean, the thing looked like us before the shave but then trampled down, miserable, broken.

‘It’s up to you,’ the human said. ‘Is there anyone here who wants to end like… like this?’

Silence.

‘For the time being I will address you,’ the human said, ‘in your own dialect. The intention is for you to learn to talk like this as quickly as possible.’ And the human said something in a language none of us understood. Again that smile appeared and disappeared.

‘First lesson,’ said the human. ‘These’ – he pointed at the garment we were wearing – ‘are called un-der-pants. All together: un-der-pants.’

We looked at our piece of clothing and then at the human.

‘All together,’ the human said a little louder. ‘Un-derpants.’

Hesitantly we repeated what the human had said.

‘Again,’ he said.

And we repeated what we had just said. Until the man nodded approvingly.

One of us bent forward and leaned on his fists while quietly repeating underpants, underpants, underpants, like a lullaby. He picked at a loose wooden splinter with his forefinger and brought the splinter up to his mouth. The human’s face tensed. He raised a hand. Everyone fell silent except the one who was bending forward and humming, eyes closed, chewing on a splinter. The human stretched out his arm. A flash shot out of the rod in his hand, a thread that looked like the lightning we had so often seen coming out of the clouds in our country. A single flash and the splinter-chewer lay groaning on the floor.

The human smiled.

‘Where were we?’ he asked.

Silence.

‘Un-der-pants! Un-der-pants! Un-der-pants!’

We learned to walk upright.

‘Faster! Taller!’ said the human.

We circled him with ramrod backs. Clockwise. Anticlockwise.

Then we learned how to shave.

‘A gentleman who doesn’t shave is not a gentleman,’ said the human.

We learned to greet each other politely. We learned a new language word by word. We learned to eat from a bowl and then with knife and fork. We learned what a toilet was, a shower, a bed. Shoes. We learned to powder our skin to make it lighter.

It wasn’t so much the long days and short nights that exhausted us as the details, the constant remarks, the number of impressions we had to process. The least little weakness or mistake was punished with a kick to the back of the knee, a poke in the ribs, a clip on the ear, never hard enough to really hurt, but the repetition wore us down. With everything you did or didn’t do, said or thought, you heard: ‘Forget everything you know. Unlearn everything you’ve done your whole life. Don’t do that. Don’t do it ever again. Act like this instead. Like this. Are you deaf? Like this!’

By evening we were completely drained and fell asleep wherever we happened to be standing. In the middle of the night the human woke us up. He was impeccably dressed. He said, ‘The ground is made to walk on, not sleep on.’ We had to run around him.

Uncoordinated movements.

Numb toes and fingers.

Dizziness.

Unable to hold our urine.

‘Goodnight, gentlemen. I have faith in you.’

From the first day I kept a kind of diary, not made of words on paper, but from strips of fabric I stuffed in my pockets. I tied the strips of fabric together and each knot contained hair, pebbles, twigs or bright pieces of plastic. The string calmed me. It became a diary, a talisman and prayer beads in one. At night I slipped the string under my pillow.

It was one of the rare days we managed to run around the man in two perfect circles: the outer clockwise, the inner anticlockwise. Everything was in order for the dormitory and clothing inspection. Nobody had dropped a knife or a fork. We had been given the evening off after dinner. Some of us were sitting or lying bare-chested on the beds to chat, others were folding up their clothes. I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror to shave. Behind me: the showers. I heard the water running, undressed and went into the showers. Steam. I saw the silhouettes of two colleagues. Or so I thought. But if that was so, how could I have felt more than four powerful hands? More than two mouths? It hardly took a couple of minutes.

I dressed and went back to the dormitory. It wasn’t until I was hanging my wet towel over the bed rail that I noticed the human sitting on another bed. He didn’t look up but I could tell from his nostrils that he smelt me. I saw him close his eyes while he leisurely breathed in the smell. Then he turned his head towards me and opened them again. We nodded at each other politely.

‘Today is an important day,’ said the human. ‘Today’ – he curled his lips – ‘we are going to learn how to smile.’

We smiled for all we were worth.

The human said, ‘Smiling does not mean baring your teeth, gentlemen! In a smile, the human breaks through in your face. Control! Authenticity!’

We tried to let a human break through in our face until we had cramp in our cheek muscles.

The human said, ‘Beauty is…’

‘Pain!’ we shouted.

‘Again! Smile!’

We were grateful.

We who had known the shifting sky as our ceiling our entire life, our only master the sun that set the red lake ablaze, the swarms of insects like tiny explosions over the water, our salvos of lazy laughter causing a frigate bird to linger over the crowns of the trees for a few seconds like a cloud of white feathers, the wall of muscle and teeth we formed in a flash at the slightest sign of danger… we no longer knew what the open air was. Lights off: night. Lights on: out of bed, wash, get dressed. Very rarely: an intense encounter with hands or mouth in the dark, lasting a few sighs at most – but nobody mentions it in the daytime, why should we, the darkness or steam made us invisible. Our human shovelled words into us, teaching us movements, poses. One morning somebody had disappeared. Everyone stared at the empty bed. But the human acted like it was nothing unusual. ‘Today is a very important day,’ he said. ‘Today we learn how to write.’

We were given a pen and a book that listed everything we had learned and everything we were going to learn.

‘This is your most important document,’ the human said. ‘Never lose your pen and your book, because if you lose them you will no longer exist. Do you understand?’

We nodded.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said somebody.

‘Yes, who?’ the human said. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Yes, sir,’ we mumbled.

‘I don’t hear anything!’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘All together!’

‘Yes, sir!’ we roared.

Our hands were not designed to grip pens but we tried and tried, so hard the tips of our tongues were sticking out of our mouths, until we were able to twist our hands perfectly around them. Ape, Ball, Cat… Ape, Ball, Cat…

I tore off the strip of paper with my first words and added it to my talisman.

Every day someone else disappeared, only to return again two days later without remembering a thing – a little quieter than before, a little stiffer. We were each given a number of responsibilities: keeping the dormitories tidy, the hygiene of the bathrooms, taking away the laundry and picking it up again. Others made sure the duties had been fulfilled. We took turns.

*

‘Come with me,’ the human whispered in my ear after the hygiene lesson. He guided me through a door I had never noticed into a corridor that led to another door. I blinked and breathed in as much fresh air as possible. It made me dizzy. Lying on a table in his office were pictures of everyone in our group – never before had I seen a photograph. I didn’t know what it was and tapped the gleaming paper with a fingertip to make sure it wasn’t breathing.

‘Pick one,’ the human said.

Cautiously I took a photo from the table, turning it round to look at the other side, but that was blank.

The human laughed. It was the first time I saw all of his teeth.

I was holding a photo of myself. I didn’t understand why the human told me that I was now really, very much on the right track.

The next night it was my turn. Half asleep, I tiptoed along behind the human. People in white were waiting for me in the corridor.

‘Your arm,’ said the human.

I held out my arm and felt the sharp pain I had felt when I was kidnapped. Everything went black for a moment.

I only remember vague things. Distant voices that sounded like they were being stretched out. Smells I couldn’t put a name to. It was white. I mean I seemed to be surrounded by mist, but then something more pleasant, softer, sweeter. Happiness.

I only know that someone helped me up after I woke and that I resisted with all my might. That I didn’t want it to ever end. That I suddenly felt nauseous and soiled myself. And that, after being cleaned, I felt uncomfortable walking because of a nagging sensation between my legs. Not pain.

Days later I still felt absolutely nothing. I mean it was as if there was an ice version of myself under my skin. A thing that knew nothing of pain or emotion.

‘Today is an especially important day,’ said the human. ‘Today we are going to learn how to con-verse.’

We had to form a circle. The human stood in front of each of us one at a time and began to talk about what he called this, that and the other. We stuttered, stumbling over our words, twisting our tongues, confusing dialect words with new words. While asking questions he tapped us on our backs (stand straight), hands (don’t pick at your clothes), knees (don’t jiggle your feet). Until eventually we could converse with each other. We worked at it from morning till evening. Sometimes I was woken up in the middle of the night by someone asking in their sleep, ‘How are you today? Good? Oh yes, I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘And now we’re going to converse and smile at the same time,’ the human said.

The next day he said, ‘And now we will converse, smile and drink a glass of wine.’ We got the rest of the day off. With a bag of ice each for our headaches. We had become unrecognizable. I looked around the dormitory. We were no longer walking on all fours. We weren’t grooming each other. We weren’t beating our chests. Now and then there was a glimmer of who we had been – somebody thrusting their face at yours and baring their teeth – but we were all slimmer than before, we stood nice and straight, we covered our mouths with our hands when we coughed and said words whose existence had been unknown to us just a few months before. We learned all the things our bodies didn’t seem to have been made for and doing so gave us new bodies. At night we had even started dreaming.

‘Tomorrow,’ said the human, who had entered the dormitory unannounced and frowned as he tapped the chins of those who were chewing lumps of ice, ‘tomorrow is one of the most important days of your life. What we call your baptism of fire. A test of whether I can carry on with you or…’

We leapt to our feet and stood straight-backed next to our beds. We held our heads at an angle to show we were listening attentively.

‘What do you mean, sir?’ someone asked.

‘I hope that I don’t have to show any of you to the new group. Do you remember that thing I showed you? Trampled, broken, miserable?’

‘Yes, sir,’ we all cried.

‘Good,’ the human said. ‘Tomorrow you’ll be ready at ten o’clock. Cocktail attire.’

‘Yes, sir,’ we cried as one.

The human started walking towards the door of the dormitory.

‘Sir,’ I said.

The human came over to stand in front of me and held his head back slightly, one eyebrow raised.

‘Why do you need a new group when you have us?’ I asked.

Everyone held their breath.

The human’s smile was almost imperceptible – a few creases at the corners of his eyes. ‘Tomorrow. Ten o’clock. Cocktail attire,’ he repeated.

As soon as he was gone, we looked up the meaning of cocktail attire in our work book: a dark suit for the gentlemen and a short dress for the ladies.

‘Ladies?’ we cried in chorus.

At exactly ten o’clock the human arrived. We were standing at the ends of our beds in dark suits, perfectly shaven. With shining shoes encasing our feet.

‘Shaved?’ said the human.

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Deodorant?’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Shoes polished?’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Teeth brushed?’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Step forward,’ the human said to one of us. ‘Walk across the room.’

It is very difficult to walk normally with all those eyes staring at you. Especially with shoes on. The human had us walk to the other side of the room in a straight line.

‘Elegance!’ he exclaimed.

Now and then he walked a pace or two in front to show us how. He turned on his heels and nodded.

He stood before each of us in turn and sprayed something that tasted strongly of mint into our mouths. Here and there he straightened a shirt collar or a jacket tail.

‘Gentlemen, follow me.’

We stood in a large hall with gleaming floors and a ceiling full of hundreds of little star-like lights. With columns and arches and, at the end of the hall, a brightly lit shell-shaped alcove. Doors that stretched up above us. We felt small but important. A door opened and a female human entered.

‘Gentlemen, are you ready?’

A group of ladies in cocktail attire came into the hall. Short dresses. Gleaming legs.

Our human whispered, ‘Gentlemen, only open your mouths to breathe, drink and talk.’

He went over to the female human, bowed, took her hand – as carefully as if it were a butterfly – and led her to a table where they stood talking.

We copied him, approaching the ladies – it felt like we were taking our first steps, as if our legs were wooden posts.

Each of us had led a lady over to a table, when we saw that there was one left. Everyone looked at the two humans, who were still chatting, though I noticed ours watching out of the corner of his eye. I don’t know why I did it, but I went over to the extra lady, bowed and offered her an arm, before leading her back to the table where my first lady was waiting. ‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘I’m honoured. What would you like to drink?’

I saw our human cover his mouth to say something, after which he and his lady laughed and nodded in my direction.

The ladies were the same girls we had talked and laughed with in the old days back home, yet, like us, they were completely changed. We acted like we were meeting for the first time and smiled while talking about this, that and the other, asking them how they were and if everything was to their taste and whether they would like something else to drink. And our shoes pinched and the jackets itched and the ladies’ dresses pinched and itched, and we discreetly used our white handkerchiefs to wipe the perspiration from our foreheads and upper lips. But that didn’t matter. Maybe it was because of the wine, but when I handed a glass to one of my ladies, I brushed her index finger with mine. And we quickly resumed talking about this and that. And my second lady batted her eyelids – lashes like hummingbird wings – while commenting on my jacket. The evening became almost enjoyable. Our human and his lady walked between the tables, tapping discreetly on a knee here and there (don’t jiggle your feet), a back (stand straight), harder on a back (not so loud), on a lady’s hip (don’t lean on the table).

Our human clapped his hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, what a beautiful day it is. May I, to make this festive occasion even more beautiful, introduce you to our other colleagues?’ He pointed to the large, central doors, which were already swinging open. Here came our colleagues. The ladies at the gentlemen’s sides. All bolt upright. Dressed in cocktail attire. Everyone smiling.

Our human said, ‘The colleagues from the Giraffa camelopardalis family.’

Four towering giraffes strode in. Or rather, four creatures that had once been giraffes.

We nodded politely at each other. They had to bow their heads to pass under the crystal chandeliers.

The female human said, ‘The colleagues from the Psittacidae family!’

A gasp of surprise passed through the hall. One of our ladies even applauded. There seemed to be no end to the pageant of those who had once been parrots. Lemon yellow, nut brown, poppy red, metallic blue, lime green, no matter how different they were from each other, they all had sharp, hooked noses. They were accompanied by four Chinese men. Perhaps that’s why they all walked the same way, as if they were each other’s reflections. A truly magnificent sight.

Our human said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce you to the colleagues from the Syncerus family!’

When we saw who it was, we quickly exchanged glances. Although their horns had been decorated with flowers and hairpieces, with gold balls on the points, we recognized the buffaloes everyone had always treated with such respect. We could see the muscles rippling under their jackets. To our relief they headed towards the other side of the hall.

The humans accompanying the families took up positions between them. Now and then they placed a finger on their right ear. Wires led from their ears down into their shirts.

A human said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, here are the colleagues from the Pan paniscus family!’

Twenty-six bonobos in black suits and dresses entered. In contrast to the other families, the gentlemen weren’t all paired with a lady. Some of the couples were gentleman with gentleman, or lady with lady. They smiled at us. One winked. Politely, we smiled back. We had never had a lot of contact with them. As far as we were concerned they were deranged. And they thought us boring.

Four humans entered the hall and looked around. They nodded at the people accompanying the families, who nodded back.

Only then did a man say, ‘Mr and Mrs Panthera pardus.’

When the two leopards entered, everyone shrank. They were breathtaking. Their clothes gleamed with each step they took.

I noticed the four buffaloes talking to each other restlessly. A buffalo lady touched the gold balls on her horns.

Mr and Mrs Panthera pardus were led across to the largest family, far from the buffaloes. For a second a high-pitched screech sounded, a noise that everyone immediately recognized as danger, danger. But a Chinese human silenced the parrots with a single command.

‘And finally,’ said our human. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I request your special attention for Mr and Mrs… Panthera… leo!’

The couple entered, surrounded by ten men with their left hands on their ears, right hands inside their jackets at breast height and scanning the faces in the hall. Cries went up from each family, including Mr and Mrs Panthera pardus. For a moment there was uproar among the bonobos, but then deafening party music burst out and dozens of humans entered from the side doors to take up positions behind us and close to the walls of the hall. Encircling us. Hands inside their jackets. I looked up to avoid being blinded by a light from the side and saw that the balconies were also manned. Not by people in cocktail attire, but by men in camouflage gear. I knew what I saw had been seen by every lady and every gentleman in the hall; we will always be like that, those of us who come from regions where a single noticed detail can mean life and a single unnoticed detail can mean death.

*

The music stopped and silence fell. Then the humans began talking, conversations about this, that and the other, which we hesitantly picked up. I noticed that everyone in our family had goosebumps where our hairs would have been standing on end. And teeth instead of smiles. And sweat rings under our arms. Still, we conversed as if our lives depended on it. And in between the conversations, everyone sniffed the air. Sometimes we even managed to talk with a colleague from another family without thinking of claws, teeth, arteries, muscles. The bonobos were the only ones to move through the hall freely. Later on we stood in a large circle, watching our humans glide across the gleaming parquet in couples – avoiding eye contact, hips glued together. And before we knew it we were humming along to the music and swaying our hips too. When the first bonobos went out onto the dance floor, the music stopped and the gentlemen bowed to the ladies, who replied with flirtatious curtsies.

As we left the hall, the most beautiful of my ladies gave me the flower she had worn in her hair. I folded it up into a bud and hid it inside my talisman.

‘Gentlemen,’ the human said after leading us back to the dormitory. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen.’

There was a blush on his cheeks and his voice was a little louder than usual.

‘I have an important announcement to make. Important not just for you but for Dreamland too.’

He walked back and forth, nodding. ‘As each of you has performed superbly in this big test, it is my privilege… in the name of Dreamland… to inform you that you may now call yourself a lawful resident of Dreamland.’

He smiled and spread his arms. ‘Gentlemen, you may congratulate yourselves!’

We applauded.

He shook our hands and pinned a gold D on every chest. D for Dreamland.

He took me by the elbow, shook his head and whispered, ‘Two ladies. Superb, su-perb.’ Pinning on the gold letter, he nicked my skin.

*

We were each handed a mobile phone. ‘This is not just your telephone but also your ID. For now, you will only be able to receive calls. That will change later, with your next promotion. Each promotion brings top-ups and new icons. Your phone is as precious to you as your heart. Lose your phone and you’re dead. And by the way, as you can also use it to take and store photos, you are now in possession of a memory.’

We spent that whole evening and night unlocking the secrets of our telephones, our memories growing with every second.

Together with the ladies of our family, we were given a tour of Dreamland the next day. When the two ladies I had escorted at the party came to sit next to me, our human said, ‘May I?’ He bent over the hand of the most beautiful and enticed her away. I heard sniggering.

We first visited the pier, where our ship had put in months earlier – it already seemed like a picture from someone else’s life. We saw the sea but couldn’t hear it, as we were now standing behind the glass wall.

‘This is where the candidates arrive,’ the human said. ‘Many feel that they have been called, few are predestined. Those who prove unsatisfactory are donated to the DMCC.’

We nodded.

‘What does DMCC mean, sir?’ asked the female human in a small voice, as if she was one of us.

‘The DMCC,’ said our human, is the Dreamland Maritime Cleaning Crew, in the hands of the Carcharodon carcharias family, also known as the Great White family. Characteristics of the family?’

The female human said, ‘The Great White family is extremely fast, effective and discreet…’

‘… with four rows of three-inch teeth and a bite force equivalent to that of three fully grown lions,’ said our human.

‘Wow,’ we said as one.

‘This family owns the waters off the coast. Ladies and gentlemen, going for a paddle in this locality is not the wisest thing one could do.’

We took photos of the pier and the sea with our mobiles. I took a photo of my lady, then wrapped an arm around her shoulders to help her take a photo of a ship. We boarded the small train that would take us around Dreamland.

‘Dreamland is on the outermost tip of an enormous country,’ the human said. ‘Nobody can go further than Dreamland. We are, in a sense, the end point, the pinnacle. And that’s why so many people come to see us. Not only to understand their own history better, but to see how they can better themselves as well. Ours is an important task.’

The train took us to a large building.

‘You know this place. Your party was held here last night.’ He pointed at the complex’s vast south wing.

‘This is where people come to celebrate being accepted into the Big Dream. Each evening, packed trains arrive from every part of the country to join in the all-night festivities. In Dreamland the sun shines twenty-four hours a day.’ Our human smiled at the female human, who bowed her head in reply.

Railway tracks ran up to the entrance of the halls.

I took a photo looking down the track that led to the pier. The human nodded at me.

Our train was approaching a large gate. ‘And now we’re going into the heart of Dreamland,’ the human said. ‘Fasten your seat belts.’

The human checked the seat belts.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes, sir!’

The gate opened and…

How can I describe it? It was as if we were on top of a mountain and below us there was… there were… thousands… No, it was as if you’d bashed the top of a termite mound with a heavy branch and stuck your head into the hole: a seething mass.

‘Here we go,’ the human cried.

The small train tilted forward. For a few seconds we hung motionless over Dreamland.

And then we fell.

Shrieking.

A feeling as if you’ve left your stomach and brains behind at the top of the hill while the rest of your body shoots down. Colours. Smells. Fear. Joy. Astonishment. Speed. Nervousness. Feeling like you have to pee. High-pitched squeals. The flash of cameras. Feeling like your face is being squashed flat by the speed. A whooshing in your ears. Eyes shut! And when you dare to open them for a second you see the world upside-down, the world rushing by. The ladies screamed. The gentlemen screamed. I tried to keep the back of my head pressed against the headrest. I heard someone yelling at the top of his voice. A sharp bend. I was the one who was yelling.

Then the world became normal again. I mean we were no longer hanging upside-down and the train slowed down and our faces gradually became face-shaped again. The train stopped.

‘What did you think of that?’ cried the human.

Our mouths were hanging open.

‘Better than swinging from tree to tree on a vine, isn’t it?’ said the human. ‘Well?’

We nodded. I felt like my brains and stomach had swapped places.

We noticed the difference as soon as we were walking around. I mean with the gold D on our clothes people gave us friendly nods and wanted their photo taken with us – bending towards the camera, cheek to cheek, smiling, flash, squeeze of the arm, thank you.

We also noticed that there were different kinds of Ds. The street-sweepers had Ds made of red fabric on their overalls. There were green Ds for those who looked after the plants. Yellow Ds for the ones whose job it was to keep the stream of people orderly. The coloured Ds all moved politely to one side when we came past. Often we vaguely recognized the red Ds as chimpanzees – the shape of their faces, a certain lethargy, their reddish hair.

After one of us had gone over to stand next to a worker and his lady had taken a photo, our human held out a hand and asked to see her mobile. He deleted the picture and returned the phone with a friendly gesture.

‘We always aim for the highest possible,’ he said to no one in particular and thus to us all.

We could never have imagined that there were so many kinds of food, in so many shapes and colours. I saw a woman holding a steaming red triangle. She bent forward, held her free hand under her chin and bit into the triangle. A thin trickle ran from her lower lip to her chin and down to her hand. A thin, red trickle.

Yellow ice cream, pink ice cream, green ice cream, orange, purple, blue…

When a long, shining car drove up behind us – the only car we saw – the human ordered us to make way. He bowed his head respectfully while the chauffeur-driven car purred past. On the back seat there was a man talking into a phone and a girl who looked out at us with a serious expression. Her eyes shone. I held up my mobile to take a photo, but a hand pushed my arm back down. ‘That’s the Head of Dreamland,’ said the human. He pulled an immaculate white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed his upper lip with it.

We saw people in small chairs fall from a great height. We saw people riding up and down on colourful wooden horses. People roared with laughter as they descended a cascade in a hollow trunk. Or screamed with delight every time a wooden ship spun round. Or were strapped into a spherical vessel that shot up, then went rolling through a tube that formed all kinds of shapes in the sky. When the vessel came back down to ground level, we saw a human in a yellow mask being helped out. Immediately he was whisked through a side door. The mask showed a broad smile and two crosses where the eyes should have been.

‘This is the Dome,’ our human said. ‘The heart of Dreamland. Where you can touch your dreams.’

A gigantic gate. In the middle, an enormous semi-naked woman who seemed to be supporting the building with her left hand while pointing up at the sky with her right. On the sides, two huge stone lions rearing like horses. Beyond the gate, a golden dome with an onion-shaped cupola rose like a crown set with glittering gems. And on top of the onion-shaped cupola was an antenna which was constantly emitting flashes of light. As if that cupola was attracting all of the world’s lightning bolts.

My lady was standing in front of me. I could smell her. She bent back very, very slightly. Enough to lean on me for a second or two. The back of her head resting on my shoulder. I took a deep breath.

Our human led us through groups of visitors with little flags and party whistles and into the Dome.

When I think about it, I can conclude that I was forced to become human in a very reckless way and that I am trying very carefully to remain it. It’s a warm evening. I sit down on a bench in the garden, take a glass of red wine from the table and look through the wine at the sun going down over the mountain. What happened to the life we led before the mountain existed? When there were buildings here. It’s funny that train tracks still run out of the mountainsides; there hasn’t been a train here for years. It’s quiet. I love watching the sunset. I put the glass down on the table and close my eyes.

I remember how amazed I was the first time I saw the great spectacle in the Dome and how excited I was to think that I was going to participate in it. After being led in through a side entrance, all the new residents of Dreamland were seated in a separate section together with their humans, surrounded by an audience of thousands. We saw the world arise before our eyes: from the darkness light emerged and there was water, and fish crept up out of that water. And those fish grew legs and could breathe, and other fish developed wings, and before you knew it some fish were stumbling around on two legs while others had begun fluttering overhead. Nature had taken millions of years to achieve what these creatures here managed in ten minutes. We clapped.

The birds must have come from every corner of the set but we only noticed them when they flocked together to form a globe. The music built up. At a signal, the globe burst open and we saw a sun shining behind it. Applause. As if by magic, the birds kept forming globes that burst open to reveal a tree or a flowing stream or a termite mound until an entire landscape had been created. And while everyone around us whooped louder and louder and gasped and clapped, our family grew quieter and quieter. I, too, had stopped cheering. We felt like we were being drawn backwards through time and space.

Warm applause sounded when a giraffe appeared. Laughter and loud applause when the bonobos came tumbling out onto the stage.

‘Watch out!’ shrieked a child.

Hands covered mouths. A leopard had emerged; it looked into the audience for a second, sprang lithely up the tree trunk and lay down on a bough. Tail swinging.

On tiptoe – no, no, don’t do it, everyone thought – the bonobos approached the tree. The leopard didn’t seem to notice.

A roar of relieved laughter and deafening applause when one of the bonobos hung off the leopard’s spotted tail and the leopard braced itself with its claws on the trunk, then used its tail to fling the bonobo straight into the arms of another.

But our family didn’t laugh. We could smell what was about to happen.

A gorilla appeared. Leaning forward on its knuckles. Back curved. Serious expression. Followed by two more gorillas.

I heard the rest of my family breathing harder. The leopard slipped down the tree trunk ten feet away from the unsuspecting gorillas and pressed itself to the ground, watching them closely. In the tree the bonobos were jiggling up and down with excitement as their gaze flashed back and forth between the gorillas and the leopard. The whole audience saw the gorillas sniff the air and suddenly become aware of the leopard’s presence.

Someone tugged on my arm. I must have jumped up in excitement.

The leopard tensed its muscles. The male gorilla stood on two legs and growled.

People covered their eyes. The gorilla beat its chest, baring its teeth. A few children burst into tears. And just when everyone thought the leopard and the gorilla were going to fly at each other, the lion appeared, shaking its mane. The gorillas and the leopard drew back, without taking their eyes off each other.

Cries of relief and fear.

The lion swung its tail, not even looking at the other animals. It strutted around, showing off its muscles and teeth and claws. It jerked its head in one direction to look at the leopard. Then in the other to look at the gorilla. It threw its head back and roared.

Everyone felt it in the pits of their stomachs.

And the lion roared again.

Glued to the ground and with its lip curled, the leopard crawled backwards. The gorilla kept its strong, massive arms in the air, but crept back.

The lion and the gorilla and the leopard: all three roared and bared their teeth. We felt it in the pits of our stomachs. In our heads. Together the animals roared our fears awake.

From every corner and from all sides bonobos suddenly appeared. The two bonobos on the branch jumped up and down. Then all of the bonobos started jumping up and down, doing somersaults, rolling over the ground and laughing.

A shared salvo of laughter. The audience threw back their heads. Deafening applause.

One after the other the animals withdrew into the wings. Until the lion, up on its hind legs, clawed the air as if waving and walked backwards, leaving one last bonobo on stage. It wrapped its arms around its belly, bared its teeth in a raucous laugh and applauded the audience.

A flock of hummingbirds gathered around the bonobo like a metal ball.

When the ball burst open, the bonobo had disappeared.

The birds formed the letters of the word INTERMISSION.

I felt a hand. The human’s voice: ‘Every time I see this, it reminds me why I’m here.’

I looked at the other members of my family. My hands hurt, that was how hard I had squeezed my fingernails into my palm.

‘And I feel proud,’ the human said. ‘Proud because I… because we get to be a part of it.’

I nodded and rolled my head. The vertebrae in my neck cracked.

It was strange to see the place we had so recently called home right there in front of us. And together with homesickness, we also felt sorrow at how irrevocably we had been changed. But we didn’t feel entirely at home here in Dreamland yet either. That would come, and soon. We nodded at each other. We would make sure of that! There was no way back!

After the break we saw our future. How the gorillas turned into humans and how we changed the world. The triumph of mankind. Lots of oohs and aahs about the moon landing – the set suddenly turned silver and a man in a spacesuit leapt out of the landing module in slow motion (applause), followed by a woman and children in spacesuits (loud applause). And the humans turned the moon into a planet where plants grew: a new world. The last image: two children, holding two little robots as pets, taking off their helmets and telling us how they dreamed of one day going beyond the sun. Into another solar system. Their little voices saying our greatest hope out loud: to travel beyond the sun to a place where they can make something beautiful and pure and new. ‘This will always be our dream,’ the boy said. ‘To make something beautiful and pure and new.’

The audience fell silent when the children stepped into the rocket with their robots. And as it lifted off, the girl’s face appeared at a small porthole. She looked at us with a serious expression and waved.

The rocket grew smaller and smaller, a dot of light in a black sky full of dots of light.

The audience put away their handkerchiefs, jumped up and burst into a thundering ovation.

I couldn’t get the look on that girl’s face out of my head.

Thanks to how easily I got along with others, I was asked to help train the animals in the show. The human said, ‘We can’t all be the same. Some animals become human; others stay animals. There’s a place for everyone. From you, I expect only the best. Always remember that.’

I was able to afford a small but respectable flat in the training complex near the pier – a bed, a washbasin, a table, a sink and worktop with a coffee machine, a single bar stool. I enjoyed the morning walk to work. I wore a suit and tie and a perfectly ironed shirt. It felt strange how quickly I won the trust of my students, how people turned to me for advice. Small changes improved the show so that it evoked even more emotion in the audience. ‘Because that’s what matters,’ I heard myself saying. ‘People have to experience something together, something they will cherish and take home with them.’ My opinions were taken seriously. I worked from early in the morning until late at night.

*

I loved the hours I spent with the lion most of all. I couldn’t get enough of just looking at him, the way he was lazy one second and able to change into a killing machine the next. The childish happiness he displayed when he smelt me coming closer. How he, the big cat, rubbed his head against the bars of his cage before rolling over onto his back to let me stroke his belly, a heavy paw resting on my arm. Both of us knew that, as strong as I was, he could knock me down with a single blow of those mighty paws. And if I ever let my guard down, it would happen. I enjoyed that danger. And the power. But I took care that no one noticed. Secretly I called the lion my weapon. What I meant was the things I had learned because of the lion were my weapon. I snipped a tuft out of his mane and added it to my talisman.

Every morning before starting work, I had a meeting with the human who had taken charge of our family when we arrived in Dreamland. After successfully training us, he had been promoted and was now responsible for organizing the training complex. He called me his right-hand man. There were two gold Ds on his uniform and he was always on the phone.

Next to the gold D on my uniform I was given a ribbon: first white, then yellow, then orange. The human hinted that by the end of the year my ribbon might even be black. ‘Then you have the right to call yourself almost human. And that brings a number of privileges with it. At least, if you pass your second big test,’ he said.

‘The second big test?’

He moved his hand across his mouth as if zipping it shut. ‘Secret!’ he said.

Sometimes I saw the human using three phones at once, as if he had more than two hands to juggle them.

One day I led a foreign delegation around the park: South American zoo owners. They didn’t seem particularly interested in what I was telling them about the attractions. Instead they drank more than was good for them. They took photos of me. I wanted to show them the Dome, but they asked, ‘When do we get to see the females?’ I pointed at the ticket vendors. They put their arms around my shoulders and nudged me with their hips. ‘The hot females,’ they groaned. ‘You know!’ They laughed with their mouths open. They slipped cards with their room numbers into my pockets, along with banknotes. I asked if they were coming to the performance in the Dome. They got angry. An Argentinian kept saying, ‘Quid pro quo.’ They demanded a taxi to take them straight to their hotel. ‘Females! Females!’ One of them was already calling my human.

That was the first and last delegation I accompanied.

Dreamland was a success. After every performance the applause was tumultuous. It attracted newspapers, magazines, camera crews. People came from all over the New World. The organizers decided to go from two shows a day to three. After a week the first accident happened. One of the giraffes broke a leg. As a result the other giraffes had to work even more.

At the morning meeting the next day, the human ordered me to take over several of his duties. He would be concentrating on the supply of new animals and trainers. I worked day and night to ensure that both the training and the organization of the shows ran smoothly. The giraffe with the broken leg was nowhere to be seen.

Sometimes I bumped into someone from my family while rushing from one training centre to another.

‘I know,’ I said before they’d had a chance to start talking about how exhausted they were. ‘We’re already working on it.’ And I was off, on my way to the next meeting.

*

One day I heard the human’s phone ring. He had gone to an urgent meeting with the suppliers of the new animals. When the phone – in his desk drawer – rang for the second, third and fourth time, I answered it. I heard a voice: ‘Tomorrow. Five p.m. Platform five. Delivery.’

‘Hello?’ I said, but the conversation was over.

When I told the human what had happened, he closed the door to his office.

‘Forehead against the wall,’ he said.

He came up behind me and pressed his elbow into the back of my neck. He said, ‘If you ever touch my phone again… If you ever open my desk drawer again…’ The tip of his elbow on the base of my neck. It hurt so much I couldn’t move my head.

As I was in the neighbourhood at five o’clock, I went to watch the train come in. I saw the human. He was wearing a cap. I lost sight of him in the enormous crowd. A little later I saw him again bending over a man who was sprawled on the ground. He helped the man up. When the man continued on his way, the human was carrying a case.

I felt a hand on my back. I tried to turn my head but felt a stabbing pain in my neck. A member of my family was standing there, dressed in the uniform of someone who leads the crowd to the dance hall.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

I pretended that I needed to answer my phone and hurried back to the office.

A little later the human came in. Without the case.

My schedule was so crammed, the only contact I had with others was during meetings. There wasn’t anyone I particularly missed. I had an ability to make people feel like they were an essential link. I pressed a fingertip against my upper lip before saying something important. If I fantasized at all, it was about body parts I remembered. My meetings ran smoothly. Everyone had their say. I had learned to frown. The body parts I remembered – a half-bared breast, a dress sliding up to reveal a leg, a bottom swelling under a skirt with each step – didn’t belong to the same person and weren’t limited to members of my family. More and more often I used fashionable words that made people feel like they were a part of something exceptional. Negative feelings or remarks were banished from the meetings. At the end of each meeting I thanked everyone personally. ‘Dreamland shows us what we can become.’ I slimmed down and was able to put on my tie with my eyes closed.

The new animals were due in two days. I had calculated precisely how many weeks, hours, minutes, trainers and pounds of feed it would take to fit them into the new shows as quickly as possible. I had made up schemes for the trainers. The human, in discussion with journalists, looked at my plan between two interviews. A few seconds was all he needed. ‘A month?’ he said. ‘Redo it. A fortnight’s more than enough.’

A journalist held a microphone up to my mouth.

The human laid a friendly hand on the back of my neck. He only needed to press the tender spot with a single finger.

‘You’ll have a new plan tomorrow,’ I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

‘Tonight,’ I said.

The human spoke into the microphone. ‘Beauty is pain.’ He rolled his eyes and laughed. His lip caught on a canine. The journalists laughed along.

The next day I was notified of a fight among the bonobos. A female was battered so badly she died.

The human didn’t even look at my new plan before approving it. I told him about the brawl in the bonobo enclosure.

He rubbed his eyelids. ‘We’re all under pressure,’ he said. ‘If you’re in a top team, you have to cope with it. Otherwise…’

‘Can I really trust you?’ he asked.

I nodded.

He gave me a second telephone. ‘Answer it when it rings. Follow instructions.’

I accepted the phone.

‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘Think of that black ribbon. More, higher, further!’

The training of the leopards had to be postponed because they wouldn’t let the trainer into the cage.

*

Between the crowded hours, I tried to visit the lion. Training a lion is like bodybuilding. A collaboration with a lion is a muscle you need to maintain; it wastes away if you don’t look after it. The lion was in a foul mood. He swung his head and kept walking the same circle. He growled and clawed at the stick I was holding. One of the keepers whispered in awe, rolling his eyes, ‘Ikroti elikhulu, ikroti elikhulu.’

Several days later I found photos in the bushes of mutilated animals in a shipping container. I cut the photos up into little pieces and burned them in an ashtray. That was the only time I used the ashtray. I added one snippet to my talisman: the close-up of a lion.

After the last show I got a call. Under the Dome there was a complicated system of passages that led between the stage and the cages and allowed the animals to be driven to and fro but be kept apart. It was an effective system as long as everyone stuck to the protocol. The lion had flaunted protocol for a few seconds, long enough to corner a leopard and its keeper in a passage and then slip into a room with the leopard. The keeper was ashen. Blood was spurting from his shoulder. He pulled me towards him with his good arm. ‘Ikroti elikhulu,’ he whispered. Great warrior. His body began to shake. Then it stopped and he stared with big eyes at something we, the living, could not yet see.

I had only just touched the door that led to the lion and the leopard when I heard roars and a loud thud. I called out the lion’s name to let him hear my voice. It was impossible to get the door open.

I instructed security to contact my human. Asking him to call me immediately.

We heard a racket that went on for minutes and then nothing.

I touched the door.

Silence.

I took the security guard’s weapon, the rod that sent lightning threads shooting out of your fingers. I set it to maximum, enough to floor two buffaloes.

I gripped the door handle, took a deep breath, opened the door and leapt in.

Two minutes later I was back outside. I leaned on the wall. My knees buckled.

The telephone vibrated. My human’s name on the screen. My hands shook even harder.

Two security guards took me to a room where I had to wait. I couldn’t block out the images of the leopard, the keeper and the lion. I tried to calm my breathing, squatting down and rocking back and forth. I pressed my forehead against the wall. The only window was too high to get any air.

They came to fetch me. In the big room with all the windows blacked out, one man was sitting at the table and four others were standing in front of it. One of the four was my human. I recognized the man leaning back on his chair as the man I had once seen in the long gleaming car, the Head of Dreamland. The four men parted, looking at me with serious expressions.

The Head said, ‘I’m aware of what’s happened.’

He rapped the tabletop.

‘It’s the first major crisis since the foundation of Dreamland. Three dead.’

Rap, rap, rap on the tabletop.

‘I’ve listened to these gentlemen,’ he said with a sweep of his arm. ‘Thank you, gentlemen.’

The four men nodded and bowed.

Silence.

‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ he said a little louder, looking at the door.

The four men glanced at each other, then left the room.

Silence.

‘Forty-eight hours,’ said the Head. ‘For forty-eight hours you are forbidden from setting foot in the office. You can, if you so desire, have a room in the luxury hotel. You can have whatever you like free of charge. But…’

A rap on the table.

‘You will not…’

A second rap on the table.

‘Work in the office.’

A third rap on the table.

Silence.

‘This is not a request,’ the Head said. ‘It’s an order.’

I thought of all the things that urgently needed doing. With my head bowed, I said, ‘In twenty-four hours the new animals arrive and it’s absolutely essential…’

A sharp rap on the table.

‘You have prepared a plan that covers the arrival of both the animals and the new trainers. You’ve done your job. For forty-eight hours you’re not to go anywhere near your office.’

I nodded. And sighed. As quietly as possible. My human would be furious.

‘Consider it a lesson in humility. But also a token of appreciation. You don’t actually need any lessons in humility. I’ve been following you for a while now.’

The Head opened a thick file in front of him. I saw family photos, reports, stills from surveillance cameras.

‘A man has to do what a man has to do,’ he said.

He closed the folder and slid a pair of scissors over the table towards me.

‘Can you cut off the orange ribbon yourself?’ he said.

It was like cutting off my own finger. I laid the ribbon and the scissors in the Head’s hand. I felt abandoned. Everything had been in vain.

He rapped the table one last time. Then he pushed something over to me.

‘I’d like to congratulate you on what you’ve already done for Dreamland and what you will undoubtedly do in the future.’

On the table was a gold D. I already had one gold D on my jacket. People with two gold Ds pinned to their chests were fully fledged humans.

I’d only just arrived at my flat when my phone rang. It was my human. He said, ‘It cost me blood, sweat and tears to save you from getting fired. You realize that, I hope. Meeting in the office in four minutes.’

He hung up. I looked at my phone. There were new icons on the screen. I checked the received calls, pressed the number and was surprised to hear the phone ring.

‘Yes?’ the human said.

I apologized. I said that the Head had forbidden me from going to the office for the coming forty-eight hours. That I was terribly sorry, but promised that I…

He hung up.

Two seconds later my phone rang.

‘Where’d you get my number?’ the human asked.

‘After the conversation with the Head new icons appeared on my telephone screen…’ I said.

‘Where are you now?’

‘At home.’

He hung up.

*

Several minutes later my front door swung open. The first thing my human saw was the gold D I was holding. His eyes kept flashing from the D in my fingers to the D on my clothes.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You can imagine how difficult it was to convince the Head…’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Not pinning the D on is against the rules,’ he said after a while.

I hesitated.

The human took the D from my hand and pinned it on.

‘Congratulations,’ he said.

He held out a hand, but I gave him a hug. The human took two steps back.

‘I’m human now,’ I said.

My second phone rang.

A voice said, ‘Four hours from now. Delivery.’

‘I’ll call you,’ the human said, opening the door.

‘But the Head said…’

‘The Head said you weren’t allowed to show your face in the office for forty-eight hours. He didn’t say you weren’t allowed to work.’ The human turned on his heel and left.

A text message that my hotel suite was ready came in. I slipped my toothbrush into my pocket, looked around my flat for a few seconds as if I’d never see it again, and left.

A member of my family was waiting at the hotel desk with a beaming smile. She caught sight of the two gold Ds and was stunned. Leading the way to the lift, she didn’t dare to look at me or say another word. Not even when I asked after the rest of the family. She showed me how to open the door of the room with the card and stepped aside with her head bowed.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she mumbled, leaving quickly. Only later did I realize that she was one of the two ladies whose company I had enjoyed during my first party in Dreamland. She smelt of detergent with a hint of apple.

The room was much too large for one person. I had never seen a bath before. I had never seen carpets like thick, ankle-deep moss. I didn’t even know the purpose of the devices in the kitchenette.

I had a headache.

In the bathroom I looked in the mirror and saw the two shining Ds and a face I hardly recognized. I placed my toothbrush on the side of the washbasin.

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes.

In a flash they were back: the images of the corridor, the eyes of the leopard as it lay there panting. And the lion with its teeth in the leopard’s neck. Me coming closer and the lion backing up, dragging the leopard along with it. The keeper’s emptying gaze.

I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face.

I looked at the screen of my telephone. Three more hours.

I went to the toilet and closed my eyes. I saw blood-covered walls. I held my head under the tap and heard music. When I followed the sound into the sitting room, I saw that the TV had switched on. The word WELCOME was on the screen.

I left for the station an hour early, relieved to have something to do, strolling through the park. There were people everywhere. The smell of food too. I checked my phones every four minutes. At the platforms I looked at the sun, then closed my eyes so I would see flashes of light instead of a lion and red walls. I tried to breathe in and out calmly until the train arrived.

An hour later I was back in the hotel room with a briefcase. Which I appraised from all sides. Which I weighed. Which I shook to see if anything was rattling around inside. I checked the locks. I went to the bathroom. A text came in: ‘On my way.’ I sat down on the bed next to the case.

*

The human opened his laptop. ‘Look,’ he said. I saw photos of myself. Short videos of me walking around Dreamland. Bumping into a man on the platform. Helping him back up.

‘Good thinking. Well done,’ said the human.

Walking back to the hotel with the briefcase. Standing in the lift with my ear to the case.

The human opened the briefcase with a key. It was empty.

‘If you want to do high-level business, you should never just trust people,’ the man said. He patted the mattress, let the soft blanket glide through his fingers and whistled approvingly.

I left the TV on with the sound off and ran through all of the functions of my phone. The only telephone number I had was the human’s. I would have been so happy to have someone to talk to.

In the middle of the night I left the hotel. The doorman tapped his cap with one finger when he saw my gold Ds. I told him I didn’t need a taxi. I sucked the night air deep into my lungs. It was quiet. The moon shone down on the grass and the big machines that swung people around upside-down in the daytime. Gleaming in the distance was the train that had delivered the partygoers to the discos.

I sat down on a bench and put my head back.

I knew that wandering around the park at night was prohibited for security reasons, but parallel to the official paths there were others, unpaved, scarcely visible: a snapped twig, flattened grass. Scent trails. Paths that were used by creatures that wore uniforms in the daytime and loved to look up at the moon in a quiet, out-of-the-way place at night. A few days after the South Americans came to visit, I had withdrawn into one of the coves, shallow caves dug out of the shore by the sea, soft sections of rock that sometimes hummed like organ pipes when the wind pushed through them. That night there was no wind. The sea. Clouds. I took off my shoes and socks and unbuttoned my shirt, folded up my jacket and laid it next to me. I stretched out on the still-warm stone and listened to the lazy splashing of the water.

Of course I wasn’t alone. Of course I knew something was approaching, extremely cautiously. I recognized the mix of new and old, smells that had not yet disappeared, more pungent than those I had grown accustomed to in my new life, mixed with apple. I felt that something’s breath on my chest. Its mouth. Its hand taking mine and placing it on warm skin. Its tongue. Its lips. My hand felt a soft breast.

Sighs.

In a flash of light (lightning? a lighthouse?) I saw a face turned to one side with the mouth open, a hand gripping a breast.

When I woke my jacket was spread out over me like a blanket.

I no longer felt sad.

The faint smell of apple.

It wasn’t until the next night that I realized my talisman had been stolen. Quid pro quo. How could it have been any other way in a place like Dreamland; what currency did we have if not dreams and precious memories?

I stretched out across a few of the seats on the pier and looked through the glass wall at the sea, the silvery, moonlit sea.

Now and then my eyes fell shut. Shocked, I sat up straight. A ship had docked. I could see movement in the darkness on deck. Pressing up against the glass wall, I pulled out my telephone and zoomed in. I still couldn’t make anything out. Then I pressed the button. Flash. And again. And again. Flash. Flash. Someone shouted in the distance. I dived behind the seats and crawled away, hoping I hadn’t been recognized. I was convinced it would only take the security guards a minute or two to find me.

I followed the night paths from bush to bush, avoiding the places with cameras. I felt ridiculous, a child who’s misbehaved.

Back in the hotel room I studied the photos on my telephone. There were animals on the deck of the ship, although they weren’t due till tomorrow. I’d plotted out the schedule myself. There were four leopards. Whereas only two were meant to arrive.

In the following photos there was a second group. I zoomed in. Impossible! We’d agreed that my family wasn’t going to… That it would be just two leopards, a pair of lions and a…

I studied the photo more carefully, enlarging it as much as possible. I recognized my little brother.

The phone in the hotel room rang. In a panic I ran out of the room. No one in the corridor. Into the lift. It had to be my brother in the photo. Nobody else holds their left shoulder so much lower than their right. Nobody else has such a distinctive red scar on their belly.

The lobby was packed with people returning from their night out. Mingling among them were two security guards with their hands on their right ears, talking into microphones. A third was standing at the desk with a telephone to his ear. I squeezed my way out through the crowd.

In the lift.

Eyes shut.

The lion dragging the leopard over the floor.

Eyes open.

Something was different inside my flat.

If only the smell.

And my bed had been moved an inch or two.

It was a reflex: I was knuckle-walking again. I sniffed the air.

I opened the window and crept out onto the ledge. For a member of my family, climbing down a wall is child’s play – the smallest fingerholds suffice.

In the bushes behind the building, I squatted down to think. I didn’t know what to do. My brain told me there must be an explanation for the night-time delivery, but my heart could only think of my brother.

Was it half an hour or an hour later that I saw someone leaning out of my flat window? I didn’t recognize the face, only the uniform.

My telephone vibrated. My human’s number. A few minutes later it vibrated again.

‘Are you in the bath?’ the human asked. ‘You didn’t answer your phone.’ He didn’t wait for my answer. He said, ‘I’ll see you on the pier at ten.’

I crept out of the bushes and strolled into the range of the first camera as casually as I could.

I arrived at the cages with my jacket over one arm. Sweating. Everyone nodded, like always. Nobody was surprised to see me. Everything went like clockwork: meal, cleaning, training.

‘Where are the new animals?’ I asked.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ someone said.

‘The animals from yesterday?’ I asked.

The man shook his head. ‘Today. No animals arrived yesterday.’

I kept walking until I had been able to look into every cage.

The man held his telephone up to his ear. He nodded. He looked at me and took a few steps in my direction, holding the phone out in front of him.

I turned around and strode off.

A voice called, ‘Sir…’

People were streaming into Dreamland for a new day full of miracles, excited and spreading out chaotically in all directions. Some of the visitors were already running to be the first to reach a particular attraction. I walked in the stream, protected by the stream, invisible in the stream, going against the stream.

*

Near the platform I slipped through a door to the fire escape. A single security guard was standing smoking with his back to me.

There was nobody up on the roof. I lay down on my stomach and looked over the edge.

Quarter of an hour to go.

I sent a text to the human: ‘I’ll be there.’

Thirteen minutes to go.

Twelve and a half.

My telephone vibrated. A call from the human. I didn’t answer.

I breathed in and out slowly.

A second call from the human.

I looked over the edge of the roof. Still no one in sight.

My heart was pounding in my ears.

Eyes shut.

The lion’s keeper in a growing puddle.

Eyes open.

Exactly three minutes and forty seconds before the train was due, they arrived. They were recognizable because they were all on the phone. More precisely, they were holding phones up to their ears and nodding. Sometimes they looked in the same direction: at the only one who was talking into his phone. He was the sole person I recognized.

The human pulled a second telephone out of his pocket and raised it to his ear as mine began to vibrate.

Two minutes to go.

The youngsters who were there to guide the groups of new visitors were waiting on the platform.

The men with telephones assumed their positions.

One minute to go.

My telephone vibrated.

I counted to twenty and called back.

I heard his voice: ‘Where are you now?’

I said, ‘I didn’t hear your earlier calls.’

He said, ‘Where are you?’

Silence.

He said, ‘In an hour on the pier.’ He hung up.

The train doors opened and people streamed out onto the platform. The men who were going against the stream were all holding telephones up to their ears.

The old trick: bump into someone carrying a case. Help them back up onto their feet. Apologize. Pick up the person’s case. Then walk off in the opposite direction.

The human went round to the side of my building.

I took a photo.

His men formed a line around him, facing out, while he unlocked the case.

Second photo.

The human opened the case, wide enough to see what was inside.

Third photo. Zoom in. Fourth and fifth photos. Banknotes, banknotes, banknotes.

The human closed the case.

Last photo: the human walked off in one direction, the other men let themselves be carried along by the stream of visitors.

I went down the fire escape.

‘What are you doing here?’ the security guard asked, one hand in the pocket where he kept the shock rod.

Calmly I pulled on my jacket to let him see my two gold Ds. I looked at his other hand. That was all it took. I simply looked at the hand that was holding the cigarette. The man threw his cigarette down on the floor and apologized. I kept staring. Ashamed, he picked up the butt. I patted him on the back reassuringly.

I, too, let myself be carried along by the stream. I looked at the photos I had taken of that case full of money, last night’s photos of the animals nobody seemed to know about. I studied the map of Dreamland. If my brother wasn’t in the cages, where was he? There was always a new wave of visitors I could dive into. As long as I kept moving. Whenever I came close to a camera I turned my face. The route I followed was random. Meanwhile I criss-crossed Dreamland in my thoughts – every room, every cellar, every corridor – in the hope of finding my brother.

The chauffeur held the car door open. For a moment I thought of fleeing. I had nowhere to go, but wanted to run till I dropped. Instead I got into the car. The chauffeur closed the door and climbed in behind the wheel. The Head of Dreamland was sitting on the back seat. He was on the phone. On the front seat, next to the chauffeur, was a girl. She smiled.

The Head laid a hand over his telephone and asked, ‘Where do you need to be?’

‘The pier, sir.’

He gave the chauffeur a nod and resumed his conversation.

‘What do you have to do at the pier?’ the girl asked. Her eyes were brown.

The Head stroked the girl’s hair and carried on talking. When his call was finished, he said, ‘So, the pier. In…’ He looked at his watch. ‘In ten minutes the new animals arrive, don’t they?’

‘Which animals?’ the girl asked.

‘Leopards, lions…’ I said.

‘How do you like the hotel?’ the Head asked.

I covered my pocket with my hand when my phone started to vibrate.

‘May I speak to you for a moment?’ I asked.

‘Do you mind if we come too?’ the girl asked.

We arrived at the pier, where a shuffling crowd blocked the way. The Head and the girl were allowed to carry on through a parallel corridor. A security guard stretched out an arm to stop me, but the girl pulled me along by my sleeve without a word. I looked back over my shoulder. The security guard had his eyes fixed on me and had pulled out his telephone.

I pointed out a spot in the distance, scarcely visible in the setting sun, where the ship was waiting for it to grow dark before coming in to dock. The girl couldn’t see what I meant. The crowd sat down in the numbered seats behind the glass wall, which was like a loudspeaker: every sound, every cry came bouncing back at us.

My phone started vibrating.

The girl was sitting between me and the Head.

On the pier security guards were listening to the voice in their earpieces.

The girl showed me photos on her phone, night-time panoramas of the lights of Dreamland.

‘It’s like flying into a city at night,’ she said.

The Head asked me where the ship was anchored. I stood up and pointed into the distance.

‘Would you like to know my name?’ the girl asked.

Surrounded by security guards, my human was standing on the pier and holding his telephone up to his ear. Mine started vibrating. I excused myself.

‘Where… Are… You?’ said the human.

‘Here,’ I said.

‘What did we agree?’ said the human.

‘Here, behind the glass wall,’ I said, waving. ‘Together with the Head.’

‘And his daughter,’ the girl said.

‘And his daughter,’ I said.

I saw the human look in our direction.

He hung up.

I saw the human whisper something into the ear of a security guard, who left immediately.

‘Where do you actually come from?’ the girl asked.

Her eyes were brown with little green sunbursts around the pupils.

‘Where do I come from?’ I said. ‘Well…’

The Head said, ‘From the same country as your mama.’

‘Nooooo!’ said the girl, thumping me on the arm. ‘Really?’

Just then the lights on the pier went out.

We heard music.

The ship could sail in to dock any moment.

The music was somewhere between the sound of an approaching storm and a crescendo of triumph.

Through the glass wall we could see a silver sky over the dark grey sea. A last wisp of red on a lonely cloud. And the Pole Star already twinkling.

‘Do you have photos of your country?’ the girl asked over the music and general hubbub.

‘There’s the ship,’ said the Head.

‘Everybody’s up on deck waiting. But they have no idea what’s in store for them,’ I whispered.

‘Are they scared?’ the girl asked.

‘A little.’

When she frowned, I added, ‘But they’re also very curious because they’ve already heard a lot about the New World.’

‘What are they scared of?’ she whispered.

The lights came on and we saw the ship. Dazzled on deck, they peered at us. Men, women and children started to call out and wave, the ones at the front slapping the glass wall with the palms of their hands.

The Head wrapped an arm around the girl. I took a photo. I didn’t need to watch what was happening on the pier. While the music and people went wild, I sent every photo I had to my second phone.

After the new animals had all disappeared from the pier and the crowd had begun hurrying towards the exits, the Head asked me what my plans were. I showed him the photo I had just taken of him and his daughter.

‘You have to give me that one,’ he said.

I handed him my second phone. ‘All the photos are on here.’ I whispered so that only he would hear. ‘And messages. And telephone numbers. You absolutely need to go through them. There are things going on here you need to know about. I ab-so-lute-ly need to talk to you in private…’

A quick look from father to daughter.

‘I think we’d better…’

‘See you soon,’ said the girl. Her fingertips brushing my arm.

‘Tomorrow,’ said the Head. Sounding weary.

I stayed where I was, alone on the stand.

As if waiting for something.

I typed in two words and sent them to my human: ‘My brother.’

I was, I think, one of the first to notice the red glow.

The fire that reduced Dreamland to ashes that night was caused by live wires sparking against each other near two containers in the presence of accelerants and fanned by the fierce wind. The warehouse burned down and the fire spread to other buildings. Fire broke out simultaneously in the offices I worked in.

Officially it was never established who rubbed the wires together or placed the accelerants. The fire must have been lit around midnight, just when the sea breeze picked up, like it did every night, as if to sweep the place clean. Only this time it happened with fire: the strong wind whipped up the sparks and flames and spread them so rapidly that Dreamland was razed in a little over three hours.

When I ran to the cages I saw animals that were too scared to escape because they were waiting for a command from their trainer. No matter how hard we tugged on their paws, they stayed put. I saw other animals fleeing as they burned and spreading the fire as they fled.

How many times have I been asked to describe the blaze? Was it really a roaring red sea that washed over every inch of Dreamland? So hot it melted everything, annihilating everything? Shattering glass, collapsing walls and roller coasters, igniting treetops? Yes. And the noise? Did it sound like a sea that’s gone mad? Yes. But worse. As if everything all around was screaming in agony? Yes. The stench was the only thing I didn’t want to talk about. That was too… too human. Sometimes I still smell it even now.

I admit that I wasn’t just searching for my brother in the fire, but for my human too. My brother to save; the human to kill. I found my brother. Or rather, I saw the containers where the conflagration had started. The charred bodies of animals they contained. Then I went looking for the human. I think he was waiting for me. As if we were on a battlefield and fighting our way towards each other, surrounded by bodies, driven apart over and over again by pockets of fire, until finally meeting for the ultimate duel. It was madness. We had both lost everything. The blaze pushed us forward, out of Dreamland.

The human was just in front of me as we ran. I screamed after him, ‘My brother! My brother! Murderer!’ He could only manage a growl – the smoke and heat had singed his throat. His face, chest and arms were blackened, so that more than ever he resembled what he had once been before becoming human – a creature with a black coat and strong jaws.

Along with everyone else, we had been driven into the city by the fire. I think he knew what he was doing; he wasn’t trying to escape or cover things up or eliminate me. He ran into the same neighbourhood a lion had run into fifteen minutes earlier, mane smouldering, roaring in panic and attacking everyone it encountered until police bullets finally stopped it in its tracks.

I stood my ground while the human ran on. It was a dead-end street. The human stopped too, bending forward. Out of breath. A few people came closer to see what was happening.

Standing there in my suit and tie with my gold Ds and my shoes and my bleached skin, I pointed at the human with his sooty face and his hands and arms that had been so blackened by the fire they looked like they were covered in hair. With his tattered clothes. Bending forward and panting. Leaning on one fist on the ground. I pointed at the human and started yelling. I yelled for all I was worth and kept pointing at the human.

Attracting more and more people.

I wasn’t the first to throw a stone. The human backed up. Blue flashing lights. Sirens. The human stood up straight. Arms raised. Up on the tips of his toes. The whites of his eyes showing. The white of his teeth. Clawing the air. His scream was like a growl.

I pointed at him. ‘Murderer!’ I bellowed. ‘Murderer!’

He roared and stormed at me.

I heard three shots.

Someone wrapped an arm around me.

Someone covered the human with a blanket.

‘Murderer,’ I whispered.

‘It’s OK,’ someone whispered.

‘Murderer, murderer, murderer…’

I was ushered into a van and driven to a sports hall where there were mattresses, medicine, hot drinks, sandwiches. The first thing I noticed: silence. No cheers when someone was brought in unscathed. I couldn’t see anyone from my family, only creatures – half human, half animal – hunched down and rocking on their heels. Men and women tried to hug them, but the creatures lay down on their sides, hands clamped between their knees. Staring into space. It was that kind of silence. Stench rising from clothes, mixed with the smell of coffee.

Towards morning, family members began dribbling in, blankets around their shoulders. They didn’t notice me. Most of them were scorched and smeared with filth. They were shattered. Quietly they ate a sandwich or two, asked where they could wash and refused any other help.

It was only when someone tapped me on the back that I recognized the woman who had been my partner at my first party in Dreamland and realized they had seen me after all. She kept her eyes lowered.

I said, ‘How are you coping? I’m glad to see you.’

She shook her head. One look, straight in the eye. ‘Why did you do it?’

That was all.

She turned and, together with the others, walked out of the sports hall.

‘Would you like to talk?’

The concerned gaze of an elderly woman.

I closed my eyes. I laid my forehead on her shoulder. And hit the back of my head with her hand. And again. And again.

The police came for me. Flanked by two officers, I made my way through the deathly quiet sports hall. When I was almost outside, I heard the noise and looked back: dozens of creatures – one raised on an elbow on a mattress, another pointing at me, yet another with a babe in arms – all hissing. Not speaking. Just hissing.

They didn’t need to question me; I told the officers everything I knew about the clandestine trade in animals, the briefcases full of money. I showed them the photos on my phone. ‘Ask the Head, I gave him the photos too.’ I told them about my brother. About the bodies in the container.

They didn’t respond.

I told them about my trek through the desert, about my education, my promotion, my training schedules, the dream we shared.

They remained silent.

A third officer came into the interview room.

I said, ‘I want to make a confession.’

The officer sat down opposite me.

I unpinned the gold Ds and put them on the table.

I said, ‘I killed a human.’ I told them how, fleeing the fire, my human and I had run into a dead-end street… How convinced I was that it had been him who… Because he’d seen me hand the telephone to the Head… And how I’d lured other people in and stirred them up against him. Until finally the police…

‘Murderer!’ I cried, pointing at myself.

‘Could you read your statement and then sign it, please?’ the policeman asked. Written on the sheet of paper was the name of the deceased and the circumstances in which he had died (aggressive behaviour towards the police, self-defence on the part of the officer). Next to my name it said: witness.

It was the first time I had signed something and the first time I had seen my name written down, and right away it was on an official document. Proof that I existed. In someone else’s story, true, but I existed.

The agent slid the two gold Ds back over the table.

‘If you like we could take you to the sports hall again. Or to the Head, as he requested that we…’

Weeks after the fire, people were still roaming the city with photos of missing members of their family. Sometimes someone would pile a few cobblestones up on top of each other in the middle of the street; someone else would lay a flower down next to them or place a teddy bear, a letter or a candle there. Others would suddenly fall silent during a conversation about this, that and the other and wipe a tear from their eye.

Months after the fire, the sunsets were more colourful than ever – echoes of the flames.

The song of the finches, thrushes, blackbirds and magpies changed because of the birds that had escaped from the cages.

People say that, years after the fire, you could still encounter animals in nearby forests, even in the city’s outer suburbs, doing tricks they had learned in Dreamland.

The Head died several days after the fire. A heart can’t keep breaking for ever: his wife’s death, the fire, the police investigation. His daughter decided, against the recommendations of her advisers, that Dreamland would not rise from the ashes. She had the rubble bulldozed to form high retaining walls and filled the gaps between with earth. I read about it in the paper. No photos of the girl, but there was a shot of the Dreamland we had once known. I tore out the picture, but, unlike many family members who had survived the fire, I didn’t go to watch.

Not that long after the disaster, a regional newspaper reported a disturbing increase in diseases among the former residents of Dreamland. Autopsies revealed a high frequency of cancer, especially in females. Rumours of medical experiments, sterilization. Another newspaper cited watertight reports that a fire of this magnitude released toxins whose long-term effects… There was, however, no danger to public health, according to the mayor. The next day the front pages were filled with news of a violent home invasion and a top ten of comparable cases. And interviews with the neighbours. And photos of the victims. Especially the children.

On the recommendation of one of the police officers who had questioned me, I was appointed night watchman at the docks, a job that allowed me to rent a tiny flat and lead a simple life on the outskirts of the city, in a neighbourhood that had been plunged into poverty by the destruction of Dreamland. More and more people slept on park benches. A young woman, head bowed, kneeling on the pavement with a baby in her arms. Not asking for money, but looking for someone to take care of her child. Unshaven men lugged glass and metal through the streets. Men with enormous sacks of empty cans. Eventually men in suits began sleeping in cardboard boxes too. There were more and more street kids. Fights. Stench. Faeces in doorways.

Members of my family had to keep a low profile because people cursed and spat at them, sometimes even threatening to kill them.

Early in the morning after finishing work, I’d go and eat my breakfast by the sea, standing on the beach with my trousers rolled up. Sometimes I stayed there all day. Now and then someone would strike up a conversation because their dog had approached me. I’d squat down and bury my nose in its coat. The dog would jump up against me with its tail wagging.

Did I see much going on at night? Terrible things? Dangerous things? Let’s just say I did everything I could to avoid fatalities and when there was no choice I called for back-up.

I remember a woman nosing around the shipping containers. When I politely asked her to leave the harbour, she bent forward so I could see her breasts. She shook her arse. ‘Fucky-fuck? You wanna fucky-fuck?’ I turned away in shame. She stank. She kept following me. What was I supposed to do?

It broke my heart when I had to hand someone over to the police, especially if it was a child with the blood of a member of my family running through its veins.

Were there things I regretted?

Of course.

Was I lonely?

Let me put it like this: on a cold night you can always find bark and branches somewhere to make a fire that will keep you warm, if only for a few minutes.

That doesn’t answer the question. What about love?

What?

Love.

There was someone. I’d seen her walking on the beach a few times, or rather, I’d seen a dog dragging her along behind it. One day I plucked up courage, squatted down and clicked my tongue. The dog raced over to me.

‘I’m Emily,’ the woman said, out of breath.

I told myself that I was doing it because I wanted to experience that sense of shaping an animal once again: I moulded the wild dog into a new, calm dog. With those big hands of mine.

‘How can I thank you?’ Emily asked.

We strolled along the beach to the pier. We sat down with the dog at our feet to watch the sunset. I offered her my arm. We went over to a fire basket to take the chill off our hands and bought sweet, warm, cinnamon-flavoured wine. She had long golden curls and big blue eyes with splinters of gold around the pupils. Her forehead scarcely came up to my armpit.

‘Where are you from originally?’ Emily asked.

I looked up at the sky and kept quiet.

She squeezed my arm.

I told her about termite mounds and honey in the forks of boughs and the sun that made the air over the lake tremble like mercury.

She stood in front of me, placed her hands on my chest and raised herself up onto the tips of her toes with her eyes closed. When I kissed her, she pressed her warm soft body hard against mine.

We saw each other five times in my flat and took hours to give each other every inch of ourselves, from head to toe. Every fraction of an inch.

On one of my free evenings, she rang the doorbell unannounced, handed me a package, shook her head and left. She turned and quickly retraced her steps, took my cheeks between her hands, shook her head once more and kissed me hard on the lips before leaving again. Her big wet blue eyes. Through the window I saw a man smoking a cigarette next to a car. When Emily got in, he tossed it away and climbed in too. I assumed he was taking her home.

The package – a cardboard box with someone else’s name on it – was empty. Perhaps it was just an excuse to be able to say goodbye. A hair was hanging off the tape, a long golden hair I wound round my index finger like a ring.

*

I threw the cardboard box out of the window.

I went down into the street to pick up the box and carefully brushed off the dirt.

I sniffed the cardboard in the hope of catching her scent.

I walked to the sea with the box balanced on my head.

I poured whisky over the box and held my lighter under it.

I drained the bottle and hurled it out to sea.

I scattered the ash over my head.

I waded out to retrieve the bottle and threw it back onto the beach.

I stamped on the bottle, which gleamed like a skull, and ground it into the sand with my heel.

Sitting together on the steps we looked at the scattered cans, piles of glass, plastic bags, a bicycle wheel chained to a signpost. Between all the different tags and stickers on a garage door, someone had written ‘I’ll rip your tits off with my teeth and look in the mirror’ with a marker pen. Normal handwriting. You had to squat down to read it.

The man passed me a bottle in a brown paper bag. We drank. He was one of the policemen who had questioned me after the fire. Two girls walked past. The smaller one looked straight at me and stuck out her tongue, but not the way little children stick out their tongues. The policeman rose menacingly and the girls ran off. The windows of the building opposite had been boarded over. The officer hoicked his trousers back up and sat down again.

‘Busy on the docks?’ he asked.

‘You too?’ I asked.

‘It’s… You know…’

I nodded.

We drank. There was no need to speak. We stared at the church at the end of the street. Every summer evening you could watch as the cupola was first gilded by the setting sun, then given a halo. Trembling. After that the stained-glass windows began to glow, as if a multicoloured fire had been lit inside the church. Radiating bright, pure colours that dimmed again extremely slowly, minutes later. If you closed your eyes, you could still see them for a long time on the back of your eyelids.

A car turned into the street and crawled down it. The music was so loud it transformed the car into a pounding heart. Open windows. The policeman’s hand disappeared under his jacket. As they drove past, the driver and his three passengers, all young, looked at us as if we were insects. The sun had disappeared behind the church.

‘What I heard,’ the policeman said, ‘is that there’s plans to close the harbour.’

‘They’ve been saying that for a year now.’

‘Soon we’re going to be banned from answering calls from the docks. No more money, you know what I mean?’

He swiped at a mosquito.

‘Another drink?’ I asked.

He stood up, tugged his trousers up by the belt and shook his head. ‘This is for you,’ he said.

He pulled a black sock out of his pocket and put it in my hand.

‘A call this morning. Someone from your family. She mentioned you. The ambulance took too long to get there.’

Inside the sock was my talisman.

‘Do you know what her name was?’ I asked.

He shook his head, wiped the sweat from his forehead, pressed his fingertips against his temples.

‘Well…’ he said.

I spent the whole evening looking at the talisman as if reading a thick book.

Five years after the fire, on the first sunny day of the year, my phone began vibrating. The next day the girl came to pick me up in the long, gleaming car. She had become a woman. She lived in a city that was so far away you had to catch a plane to get there, but she hadn’t sold her parents’ house. Whenever she had time off, she came straight here.

We got out of the car.

‘Then I sit here on this bench in the garden with a glass of wine and look at the mountain,’ she said.

She had arranged for trees to be planted and flowers sown. The birds did the rest, spreading the seeds that rapidly transformed the pile of earth into a flowering mountain.

‘It’s still not colourful enough,’ I said.

‘Nothing’s stopping you.’

She showed me round the house. ‘Which room would you like?’

I chose the room with a view of the sea.

She laughed. That was one she’d already prepared for me.

‘My name’s Lucia,’ she said.

Hanging on the wall of her bedroom was the photo I had taken of her and her father on the pier.

I moved into the house and stayed there. Even after a taxi came to pick Lucia up a week later. I kept working in the harbour, though there’s no way of stopping the people who hide in containers in search of a better life elsewhere. I squat next to the containers and ask, ‘A better life?’

When they start talking about places overseas where the eggs are as big as a child’s head, about fruit falling into your hands from the branches and honey you can lick straight from the fork of a bough, I travel with them in my mind’s eye. Sometimes I tell them my own story. I inform the police about which containers the stowaways are hidden in, but only if I think they’re not strong enough to survive the disillusion about their promised land.

On my days off I prepare a simple meal and take it into the city, where I visit family members who have been released from prison. We don’t discuss the disaster. We reminisce about the ones who didn’t make it, the good memories only. It’s strange that we never talk about where we come from. Usually we stick to very ordinary things, because every life is made up of a series of ordinary things, sometimes arranged in an extraordinary way.

I love watching people: the way they revolve around each other like small, warm magnets. The looks they exchange. And how a split second is enough for the bodies of complete strangers to attract or repel each other. How quickly an argument can flare up – I feel it the same instant in my vertebrae. The physical brilliance of the pickpocket moving unseen through the crowd, or the boy on a skateboard gliding between other people, completely immersed in his own body: the way he lays a sugar cube on his tongue, closes his eyes and slaloms perfectly between all those bodies by just moving his hips. The way he suddenly stops, flicks his skateboard up into the palm of his hand with one foot and turns a cheek to the sun while around him a soundproof bubble grows. Insignificant miracles like that.

Am I homesick?

I keep the mountain tidy. Sometimes I drive dozens of miles to find the perfect bulb whose flowers will complement the others and make their colours look even more glorious. Putting something in the ground that will appear months later makes me happy. Like fragments of a forgotten poem, I will recite the botanical names of the new flowers and trees while Lucia points them out. This mountain, filled with rubble, is my talisman, my history, my memory, my fragments. As long as I have  this mountain and Lucia, how could I be homesick for some other life or place? I see this life of mine, this third life, as something I… I don’t always understand what…

Silence.

… I did to deserve all this.

Do you feel guilty about something?

A long silence.

Sometimes I’m still bothered by old dreams: the lion dragging the leopard over the floor, the lion’s keeper with a puddle growing round his head like a kind of halo. My human with raised, blackened arms. Sometimes the dreams are newer: a woman’s half-turned face, catching the light for just a few seconds, her hand on her breast. A woman at the harbour bending forward with her dress raised, looking back at me over her shoulder. A woman squatting on me and slowly tilting her pelvis forward and back, her arms dangling beside her body, her head tilted as if she’s on the gallows. Me, with a briefcase – dark liquid seeping from the seams. Me, in a cage emptying a jerry can of petrol over the animals and holding a lighter to the puddle as my human catches me at it. Me, joyfully kicking open the cage. Me, holding a woman’s head by the hair and moving it up and down rhythmically. Sometimes the leopard has a woman’s head, sometimes the woman has a leopard’s body. All of them are staring at me – myself included. Without blinking. They stare at me in complete silence.

Why do you feel guilty about your dreams?

Silence.

What do dreams remember of the things I myself have forgotten?

Lucia and I only ever call each other about practicalities. Convinced that people have a limited number of words at their disposal, she is determined to save them up for when we’re together. Sometimes we don’t see each other for weeks on end. A week is made up of 168 hours. That’s 10,080 minutes. That’s 705,600 heartbeats. At rest.

On the days when the sorrow and loneliness are too much to bear, I climb the mountain all the way to the top, then lie on my back and wait for night to fall. The moon is big in the sky as if rushing towards us, unstoppable, headed for our world and leaving us just a few days to reconcile ourselves to our fate. What would I do? What would hurt the most? Would there be someone with me when I died?

Afterwards I drive around the harbour. With the headlights off. Slowly. As if in a dream.

There are three bookcases in the house: the Head’s, Lucia’s and her mother’s. In the evening I sit in front of the fire and leaf through books from Lucia’s bookcase. In one of them I find a sheet of paper with handwriting on it. I like to read those words out loud – as if she herself is whispering in my ear:

The mud of the city streets suddenly seemed to turn red or black, like a mirror when a lamp is being carried around in the next room, like a treasure in the forest…

It took a while for me to read those lines because I kept being drawn to that one phrase, reading like a treasure in the forest, and seeing myself back in the forests of my youth – baobabs, tall grass… After that I thought about the stowaways in search of their treasure. Only after a while did I realize that the passage wasn’t about me, and not about Lucia, but about our world: a yearning everyone shares. And later still I realized that the treasure was the beating heart of the words. Not me, not the forest, but the treasure. Which might not even exist. Or might only be a reflection. And the sorrow that causes.

Finally I understood that the treasure does exist and has touched me. So that I will never stop seeking it. Longing. I will never stop wanting to be touched again by longing. And again.

In another book I found another handwritten note: Fail, fail, and fail again. Fail better!

The inconsolable consolation: it is not up to me to understand myself or the words, and yet there are words. Words that understand me.

On balmy evenings I sit on a bench in the garden – which fills the whole valley – pick up a glass of red wine and look through the wine at the sun.

It’s funny that there are still railway lines running out of the mountain. There haven’t been any trains here for years.

The sound of the city is almost completely blocked out, murmuring, just loud enough to make me drowsy.

I put my glass back on the table, next to the bottle and the second, empty glass. I close my eyes. I know that it won’t be long before a car stops, before a door opens and closes. Quick footsteps on the deck. I’ll smile because a warm hand will come to rest on the back of my neck. A kiss on my temple. Without turning, I’ll take the bottle from the table and hear the two glasses clink against each other as Lucia picks them up in one hand.

We’ll walk to the mountain.

*

The way she tries to balance one-legged on top of the mountain: holding the two glasses in one hand while using the other to remove first her left shoe – changing to stand on the other leg – then her right.

She kneels down. She puts her head back and shakes her hair free. She holds out the glasses. I pour the wine. Her smile.

‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘What happened while I was away?’

We clink glasses.

I start talking.

She savours the wine with her eyes closed and listens. She takes another sip and the last, saffron sunlight runs down her forehead and over her cheeks to her throat.

I pause.

‘More,’ she says without opening her eyes.

I know what’s coming. The very last bit of sunlight falls through her. She is a small, ember-red heap on the mountaintop.

Whatever happens, that is the image of her I don’t want to forget.

Acknowledgements

‘The mud of the city streets… like a treasure in the forest…’ on page 118 comes from Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (translated by David Colmer).

Subscribe

Peirene Press publishes series of world-class contemporary novellas. An annual subscription consists of three books chosen from across the world connected by a single theme.

The books will be sent out in December (in time for Christmas), May and September. Any title in the series already in print when you order will be posted immediately.

The perfect way for book lovers to collect all the Peirene titles.

£35 1 Year Subscription (3 books, free p&p)

£65 2 Year Subscription (6 books, free p&p)

£90 3 Year Subscription (9 books, free p&p)

Peirene Press, 17 Cheverton Road, London N19 3BB

T 020 7686 1941

E subscriptions@peirenepress.com

www.peirenepress.com/shop

with secure online ordering facility

Peirene’s Series

FEMALE VOICE: INNER REALITIES

NO 1

Beside the Sea by Véronique Olmi

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

‘It should be read.’ GUARDIAN

NO 2

Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal

Translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell

‘Understated power.’ FINANCIAL TIMES

NO 3

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

‘A small masterpiece.’ TLS

………..

MALE DILEMMA: QUESTS FOR INTIMACY

NO 4

Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

‘Inventive and deeply affecting.’ INDEPENDENT

NO 5

Tomorrow Pamplona by Jan van Mersbergen

Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

‘An impressive work.’ DAILY MAIL

NO 6

Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig

Translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis

‘Weird, creepy and ambiguous.’ GUARDIAN

SMALL EPIC: UNRAVELLING SECRETS

NO 7

The Brothers by Asko Sahlberg

Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

‘Intensely visual.’ INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

NO 8

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul

Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

‘A brilliantly drawn character.’ TLS

NO 9

Sea of Ink by Richard Weihe

Translated from the Swiss German by Jamie Bulloch

‘Delicate and moving.’ INDEPENDENT

………..

TURNING POINT: REVOLUTIONARY MOMENTS

NO 10

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

‘An extraordinary book.’ STANDPOINT

NO 11

Mr Darwin’s Gardener by Kristina Carlson

Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

‘Something miraculous.’ GUARDIAN

NO 12

Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall

Translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm

‘A remarkable find.’ SUNDAY TIMES

COMING-OF-AGE: TOWARDS IDENTITY

NO 13

The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov

Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield

‘Immense poetic power.’ GUARDIAN

NO 14

The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik

Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin

‘Shrewd and psychologically adroit.’ LANCASHIRE EVENING POST

NO 15

Under the Tripoli Sky by Kamal Ben Hameda

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

‘It is excellent.’ SUNDAY TIMES

………..

CHANCE ENCOUNTER: MEETING THE OTHER

NO 16

White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen

Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

‘A tale of epic substance.’ LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

NO 17

Reader for Hire by Raymond Jean

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

‘A book that will make you want to read more books.’ COSMOPOLITAN

NO 18

The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen

Translated from the Norwegian by John Irons

‘Disturbs and challenges.’ THE NATIONAL

NEW IN 2016

FAIRY TALE: END OF INNOCENCE

NO 19

The Man I Became by Peter Verhelst

Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

‘Simple, but wonderful and impassioned.’ DE STANDAARD

NO 20

Her Father’s Daughter by Marie Sizun

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

‘Beautifully controlled.’ LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR

NO 21

The Empress and the Cake by Linda Stift

Translated from the Austrian German by Jamie Bulloch

‘Impressive.’ TAZ

Peirene Press is proud to support

Counterpoints Arts

Counterpoints Arts is a charity that promotes the creative arts by and about refugees and migrants in the UK.

‘We are living in a time of human displacement. We need bold and imaginative interventions to help us make sense of migration. And who better to do this than artists who are engaging with this issue.’

ALMIR KOLDZIC AND ÁINE O’BRIEN, DIRECTORS, COUNTERPOINTS ARTS

By buying this book you are helping Counterpoints Arts enhance the cultural integration of refugees – a mission which will surely change our society for the better.

Peirene will donate 50p from the sale of this book to the charity.

www.counterpointsarts.org.uk

About the Author and Translator

AUTHOR

Peter Verhelst, born in 1962, is a Belgian Flemish novelist, poet and playwright. He has written more than 20 books. His work has been praised for its powerful images, the sensuality and richness of its language and the author’s unbridled imagination. His breakthrough came in 1999 with the novel Tonguecat, which won the Golden Owl Literature Prize and the Flemish State Prize for Literature. The Man I Became is his eleventh novel.

TRANSLATOR

David Colmer has translated more than 50 books from the Dutch: novels, children’s literature, and poetry. He has won a number of translation prizes, including the 2009 Biennial NSW Premier and PEN Translation Prize for his body of work. In 2010 his translation of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and in 2013 he won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his translation of Bakker’s The Detour.

Copyright

First published in English in 2016 by

Peirene Press Ltd

17 Cheverton Road

London N19 3BB

www.peirenepress.com

This ebook edition first published in 2016.

First published under the original Dutch language title Geschiedenis van een berg in 2013 by Uitgeverij Prometheus, Amsterdam

Copyright © Peter Verhelst, 2013

This translation © David Colmer, 2016

Peter Verhelst asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN  978–1–908670–27–4

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Designed by Sacha Davison-Lunt.

Photographic image by plainpicture / Krista Keltanen

The translation of this book is funded by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren www.flemishliterature.be).

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates!” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org