Author: Knud Wollenberger
Translator: Steph Morris
“There are loads of these animals running around there; they might form herds and
attempt to attack…” (talking about the Chechen rebels)
read in a Berlin daily newspaper, 20 March 2000
Someone speaks
Someone stutters, speaks hurriedly
Someone must have debts to pay
Someone clenches their fist, powerless
Someone found a dent in their bodywork this morning
Someone is furious about it
Someone draws their index finger across someone’s throat, like this
Someone is the first to bend down
Someone picks up a stone
Someone grabs a baton
Someone holds the banner, a flag
Someone makes symbolic gestures
Someone hits out at someone with a truncheon
Someone orders the demonstrators to disperse; the demonstrators already running away
Someone curls up on the tarmac and gets kicked, many times
Someone can’t protect themselves
Someone grasps someone’s curly hair
Someone pulls out a knife
Someone is saying something in front of a running camera, a sentence is cut, a voice-over comes in
Someone is being mentioned in the media, still
Someone has just… just stabbed someone
Someone escapes, bleeding, to the hallway of a house
Someone pulls on the iron bolt for ages
Someone keeps asking insistently
Someone has blown up the bridge’s biggest pier, the middle one
Someone is making money out of this, people say
Someone will never be seen again, never again
Someone’s house is burning
Someone has fired through the windows
Someone has barricaded the road leading into the village
Someone demands all money, objects of value, collects up documents, distributes permits
Someone has rounded up the village families
Someone checks the time nervously; apparently it’s getting late
Someone points several times to her daughter, still a minor
Someone kneels and begs to be spared
Someone gesticulates
Someone herds the remaining people down the road
Someone is giving the orders here
Someone picks up the cigarette butt
Someone is smoking
Someone orders all the men to stand over here, women and children over there
Someone nods silently
Someone gives the sign
Someone chews gum and strikes out cheerfully with their rifle butt
Someone sees it
Someone in black clothing, leather clothing
Someone has one last go at escaping; he doesn’t get far at all
Someone holds on to the dying, attempts to console them; now someone lies next to them
Someone sees all of this in slow motion, frame by frame, in the middle of the day
Someone has no hope, here, and now, he is safe, or so he is told
Someone sees someone contradicting something
Someone should go back where he comes from, go home, to the village, back there
Someone wrote that
Someone speaks out, speaks quietly, too quietly, against this
Someone says,
That’s all now. I can do no more.