Painting, Shovel, Pomegranate

von Marcus Krug

Inspector Li gets up. Walks around. And sits down again.

I assume that I was brought to the local police station after some law abiding citizen found me unconscious and heavily drugged on a beach littered with cardboard boxes. I am still a bit hungover and my memory seems to be connected to a Wi-Fi-hotspot other than my-self.

Inspector Li gets up again. He walks around with his arms folded behind his back. His back is slightly over bent. He apparently tries to look like a proud Mao (Zedong) in his best years, walking the lines of his fellow communist guerrilla fighters.

Inspector Li is keeping an eye on me while pacing from wall to wall – starting from the cross-barred window to a heavy wrought-iron door – back and forth. My arms are behind my back, too, even behind the back of the chair – not folded but tied to each side with handcuffs. I do not understand.

Inspector Li sits down, shakes his head and says he does not understand.

“What don’t you understand?” I dare to ask after a little while, in a very low voice with a bowed head.

“Why you are here.” he says.

“Your people brought me here.” I say a bit louder, testing his reaction upon my suspicion. He is puzzled and stares out of the window.

“That’s not what I mean.” he says absent-mindedly, still with his gaze pinned at something invisible to me outside the window and the room.

The room is white. White tiles on the floor and white tiles on the walls up to the ceiling. There’s a tiny white ceramic sink in the corner by the door. And a bottle of hand sanitizer. Apart from the window and the door, all is glaring white. There is a table in the middle of the room and two chairs – white of course.

Inspector Li is wearing a Chinese police uniform in dark blue, with all the insignia of a high ranking official. He is short, shorter than me. All people here in the south are shorter than me which seemed almost impossible just a couple of month ago, back in Europe.

When he takes off his police hat and puts it on the table, I can see his head. He’s balding. You can clearly see that he’s overly conscientious to hide it. The comb over looks so desperately elaborate, it could easily be taken for one of those traditional Chinese ink paintings – an abandoned pavilion on top of a lonely hill, surrounded by weeping willows, mourning the bearers receding hairline.

Inspector Li sits down again. Stares at me for a couple of seconds and then concentrates with his utmost care on my passport in front of him – leafing through it. Over and over again.

Since my hands are tied to the back of the chair, I try to move my legs to keep my blood circulation going. They don’t move an inch, either. I look down on me and the first thing I realise is that I am stark naked. I can’t see them but it feels like my feet are tied to the chair, as well.

Baffled, I look up at Inspector Li. He’s smirking at me now. His mouth and overbite look like an excavator’s shovel covered by too small a tarp. The shovel prongs – it seems – are still sticking out from under the tarp.

“Where are you from? What does this ‘Germany’ mean?” he finally asks me, holding my passport with both of his hands – still smirking.

“DeGuo” I say in Mandarin. ‘The Land of Virtue’ or ‘The Land of Willpower’, depending on the context, I think to myself.

“Ah,” he says “‘Xitelei’!” which is Chinese for Hitler.

“What about him?” I ask, barely hiding my annoyance. For fuck’s sake, do we always have to be reminded of the least popular figure of our history?

“He likes to bark.” Inspector Li goes on.

“He liked to bark!” I say with audible defiance.

“No, no, no, he’s old and frail, but he’s still alive and likes barking,” he says. After some time – and a look at my bewildered face – he eventually decides to add “my dog.”

“What’s your dog’s breed?” I ask quickly. Just for the sake of small talk and to distract myself from the nonsensical situation I’m in.

“Oh, a French Bulldog he is.” he says, gradually zoning out, again.

He doesn’t seem to be interested in small talk or in distracting me from circumstances like this. He has turned his attention back to my passport, again.

Seeing him like this, there is something disturbingly eerie about Inspector Li and I don’t know what exactly it is. I don’t think it is his frog-ish appearance – his flat head with gibbous eyes, prongs for teeth; neckless, stout, square-ish torso and lanky but short limbs. The longer I look at him – at his over bitten shovel smirk, his puffed-up eyes and his artsy fartsy hairdo – the more I want to run away – even without any clothing. I have never run naked before. But I think it ought to be okay, once you get used to your private parts swinging about. I think, I am losing it.

I am in this room for more than two hours now, I guess. It appears to me thattheir strategy is to drive me nuts with this goofy wannabe authority figure in front of me. He’s still examining my passport – after all this time. I gave it more than one try to engage him in a conversation, but all in vain. Whatever I say, his only response is always that he does not understand why I am here. In between there is only silence. Unbearable menacing silence. You could have heard a single eyelash smash into the white tiled floor, if only one of us had ever dared to drop one.

An annoyingly persistent ringtone is shredding this very silence in wafer thin slices and Inspector Li is digging his nastily vibrating mobile phone laboriously out of one of his tight uniform pockets. He answers the phone in local dialect. I don’t understand a word.

After he’s put the phone back in his pocket, he gets up and walks over to the far left corner in my back. I follow him with my eyes – turning my head. What I see in the corner makes me break out in a cold sweat. My previous assumption that the room is all white was actually quite incorrect. In the corner, there’s a huge splash of red. And there’s a rubbish bin underneath. Next to the bin on the floor there’s a glass jar with a metal lid. Inspector Li picks it up and returns to the table. He sits down.

Beads of sweat on my forehead and my eyes widened like portholes – short, the terrified look on my face coerces him to only one word of explanation regarding the bloody red mess. He stares at me for a couple of seconds and the only word he is willing to push over the edge of his lips is “pomegranate”.

He unscrews the lid from the glass jar and comes over to my chair. Without uttering a single word, he motions me to lift my bum. From under my behind he pulls a cotton cloth soaked with my sweat and puts it quickly in the glass jar and closes the lid tightly.

From somewhere in the room – probably from under my chair – he makes a canvas tote bag appear and sets it on top of the table – right in front of me. But I am still tied to the chair. The next thing he does is almost inconceivable. He comes over, sniffs my body odour and calls me a fox.

Eventually, he looks at my right hand, sees the yellow-brownish smoking stains on my fingers and puts a set of keys in my left hand instead. Then he opens the door and leaves. On his way out, he says “You’re free to go now.” The next second he’s gone.

This room seems to be in the middle of nowhere. I take a look out of the door and see only barren landscape. Lost in thoughts about unchaining myself from the chair, I look out of the door – staring into absolute nothingness.