A Story. In “Die Welt, an der ich schreibe” (Ed. Kurt Neumann)
Verlag Sonderzahl  2005

Three times the people were saved. Three times the people carried

the image of their liberator through the streets. Behind the walls of the white house lived the man and the woman and the child. In the garden the roses bloomed. The cicadas sang. The palm trees shook their long feathered hair. The dates were yellow, then red. Mish-mish is what the small, sweet apricots are called. At the bazaar the child drank pomegranate juice and watched a beggar who made pictures by holding his pencil with his toes. He had no hands.

The man gave the woman a television set as a present. Side by side they sat in the living room and watched American movies. The picture flickered, but that did not matter to them. The man dreamed of living in America. The woman had a different dream. She wanted to return home to the land she had come from.

On the day the television station was seized, she made her decision. The film that was running was interrupted, and in the television studio you could see the man who was the last one to save the people. Soldiers shoved him in front of the camera and tied him down to a chair. Someone who stayed invisible pointed his pistol at him and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit him, but did not kill him. The liberator of the people died a slow death. The people watching television looked on as he did. Again and again the hand of the invisible murderer grabbed the dying man by the shock of his hair and raised his head toward the camera. In this way everyone was able to see when he was finally dead.

Translation Geoffrey C. Howes