Joe Speedboat
Page 6
‘HUNDRED TWENTY!’ Christof screamed.
The pointer kept crawling along, Joe gave it a tad more throttle and Engel shouted, ‘STOP!’
A hundred and thirty kilos of traction: the plane had passed the test.
One day Joe asked me to help him with a little experiment. He rolled me over to the workbench in the hangar, then sat down on the other side. The workbench Engel used for his drawings was between us. Taking my right hand in his he moved our elbows to the middle, so that our forearms formed sixty-degree angles with the tabletop. In one quick move Joe pushed my arm down, making me lean over crookedly in my cart. He brought my arm upright and pushed again, but with less force this time, so it took longer for me to tilt over. The back of my hand touched the tabletop. I looked at him, wondering what it was he wanted from me. He set me upright again.
‘Put a little muscle into it this time,’ he said.
I put a little muscle into it. So did he. We sat there across from each other like that for a while. Then he threw his shoulder into it and pushed harder. I didn’t budge, he pushed harder and his eyes bulged. I gave a little.
‘Put some muscle into it, damn it!’ he groaned.
I buckled down and brought our hands back to the middle of the table.
‘Push!’
I pushed him down. He groaned and let go.
‘Was that difficult?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘A little bit difficult?’
Not very difficult. Joe nodded contentedly and got up. He went out of the shed and came back with a couple of rusty iron bars under his arm. The bars were of different thicknesses; he clamped the thinnest one between the jaws of the bench-vice at the end of the table.
‘Bear with me here, Frankie,’ he said, and rolled me over to the bench-vice. ‘Now, can you bend that?’
I grabbed the bar and bent it. Joe put the next one in the vice. This one was thicker. When I bent it back at an angle I didn’t feel much resistance, but the dent of the iron still glowed hot in my hand. Bending things felt good.
Joe fastened the final bar in the vice. It was a lot thicker than the first two. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled, but the bastard wouldn’t budge. I went at it, I didn’t want to disappoint Joe. A weird noise came from my throat, I pulled like my life depended on it, but nothing much happened. What I did hear was the sound of breaking glass, and metal clattering against stone. Then it gave – it came slowly in my direction. What was that running out of my nose; was it blood or snot?
‘Whoa, big fella!’
I let go and, to my surprise, the bar sprang back like elastic. There was a loud crash. I groaned in disappointment: the iron hadn’t bent, it was only the other side of the workbench lifting off the floor – the sound I’d heard was falling beer bottles and tools. I had failed.
‘Fantastic,’ Joe said, ‘really fantastic. Do you have any idea how much that bench weighs?’
He squatted down beside me. His face was close to mine, he didn’t blink, and I noticed that his left eye shone differently from the right one – the left eye was shooting fire, tempered in turn by the right one, which held a sort of compassion greater than I could grasp.
‘That arm of yours might take you places,’ he said. ‘Keep it in good shape, you never know.’
It was winter, the river left its banks. Around Ferry Island the current rose, and metre by metre the washlands disappeared beneath grim, sloshing water.
Then the Lange Nek went under, and before long only the traffic signs, lampposts and trees still stuck out above the water. Piet Honing brought the ferryboat to safety in a quiet inlet a ways north and ran the service between Lomark and Ferry Island with the amphibian that belonged to Bethlehem Asphalt.
Every morning and every evening the shivering asphalt men waited for him, the managers with their attaché cases and the workers with lunchboxes in hand. Most of the asphalt men were on bad-weather leave, though; once it was no longer possible to travel by regular means between Ferry Island and the shore, production had halted. Repairs and administrative work were all that went on. Piet Honing steered standing at the back of the amphibian and didn’t mind the cold – his face had that leathery texture that weathers but doesn’t wear out with the years.
In winter the inhabitants of Ferry Island, like Engel and his father, became real islanders. They did enough shopping in Lomark to last them a week, then locked themselves away in their restored isolation. The island used to be full of real anarchists, radical folk who drank potato moonshine and hunted hares with impunity, for the arm of the law wasn’t long enough to cross the water. They were notorious for smacking each other over the head at the slightest provocation. That’s all changed, though, people aren’t like that anymore. They’ve grown tame. Everyone can afford a bottle of store-bought gin, and when you see them out walking their dogs you wonder who’s been domesticating whom.
The river lapped against the winter dyke now, an expanse of water so vast it made our hometown look like Lomark-by-the-Sea. When darkness came along the drowned stretch of the Lange Nek, the streetlights would pop on and leave regular rings of light on all that hectic water bustling toward the sea.
Ferry Island had been cut loose from the rest of the world, but I was the one who felt adrift. I was outside the circle of light, missing the final construction work on the plane. Joe and Christof crossed with the amphibian, I patrolled the dyke like a nervous watchdog, looking out across the water from the winter dyke to the plant. Most of the time they stayed inside and out of sight. Wednesday perched on my shoulder. He stuck his beak in my ear.
A cold front was coming in, and before long even Piet Honing and his amphibian would be landlocked. Only the courageous would venture out onto the sea of ice then, two by two, roped together at the waist and carrying a pair of ice picks in case one of them went through. ‘Raise the water, add lots of ice and then shut the lid on it’: that’s what they say here when the wash-lands freeze over.
What I kept wondering, though, was how the plane was supposed to take off; you needed more or less the length of a football field for that, and it just wasn’t there.
The factory grounds were quiet, the bulldozers idle among the piles of gravel, the sky was sharp and clear. Finally I spotted movement on the other side. Looking through my telescope I saw Joe sliding open the doors of the shed. Christof and Engel pushed the sky-blue, wingless fuselage outside. Even knowing that the wings were coming later, it was hard to imagine the thing ever leaving the ground. For me, seeing it was like seeing the first airplane ever built. Over yonder, the pure desire to pull a fast one on gravity had materialized in the form of a long, kind of chunky box on wheels. There was a tailpiece, a propeller and an engine, and whether the thing ever left the ground or not I felt something for which I would find the right words only later, when reading about the history of cinema: the triumph of the will. Joe was the one who’d had the creative flash, Engel had stylized the idea into a sky-blue spacecraft . . . and then you had Christof, who checked the oil. And me? I was the one who’d bent the ribbing into the right shape.
Wednesday polished his beak on my shoulder and I set my cart rolling.
After going home to warm up a little beside the fire, I came back. They still didn’t have the wings on it. Joe was driving the plane around the grounds with Engel and Christof running along behind. Over here on the dyke, I could almost hear their excitement.
Joe had said he needed a football field in order to take off. Now there was a plane, but still no runway. For the first time, seeing Joe driving around in circles in his watch cap and ski goggles, I began having doubts about his foresight and – let me be honest – his genius as well.
Once he’d learned how to work the rudder, which took a couple of days with a three-axle steering system, they put the wings on it. After that there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre amid the piles of asphalt; the plane was now almost twelve metres wide.
Then, sitting there on the dyke, it suddenly
dawned on me – I saw at last what Joe had seen long ago: the solution to the lift-off problem. It was every bit as simple as it was stunning: Joe had been waiting for the freeze to set in – the ice was going to be his runway! It was brilliant, and I couldn’t help being amazed by his technical ingenuity. Once the plane left Ferry Island he could maybe park it somewhere else, somewhere in an abandoned shed or an underground bunker; in the presence of that great, calm soul who could plant bombs or build planes or do God knows what else without batting an eye, anything was possible. I mean, he was fifteen at the time, there was a whole world of unsettling ideas left for him to carry out with the unflappability of a bicycle repairman.
It wasn’t even so much that Joe was an unusual kid: he was a force unleashed on the world. When he was around you couldn’t help but feel a tingle of expectation – energy coagulated in his hands, he juggled the making of bombs, the racing of mopeds and the building of airplanes like a merry magician. Never had I seen anyone for whom ideas led so naturally to their own implementation, a person on whom fear and convention had such a shaky grasp. He dared to think the impossible, and noticed nothing of the disapproval going on behind his back. There were, after all, were plenty of people who didn’t like Joe, because there was too much about him that defied understanding. Most people are average, some even downright substandard; all of them, however, are extremely sensitive to the higher concentration of energy or talent in the above-average person. If they have no access to that which makes you shine, they don’t want you to have it either. They have no talent for admiration, only slavishness and resentment. They steal the light.
Regina Ratzinger is in the front room showing us her pictures. She’s tanned and skinnier, even though it’s winter. She went on holiday to Egypt on her own – which is to say, with a group of people she didn’t know, led by a couple who acted as their guides. The pictures she made of the pyramids were taken at the hottest hour of the day; the clearest thing about them is the triangular shadows. Chefren, Cheops and Mykerinos are the names she rattles off, or is it Cheops, Chefren and Mykerinos? – she can’t remember.
‘A whole stack of man-hours went into those,’ Joe says.
She tells us about a man with a turban and tobacco-colour teeth who helped her up onto a dromedary, after which she went for a knee-knocking ride in the desert. Then they had to climb back into the bus; there was so much to see, Egypt had so much to offer that you simply couldn’t keep track of it all. On the west bank of the Nile, close to Luxor, the whole group was boosted onto donkeys and they rode through all kinds of ruins and necropolises and you never had to ask directions because, as the owner said, ‘donkey knows the way’. The animals stopped on cue in front of a little shop with brand-new antiquities, stopped again beside the ice-cream vendor in the shadow of a crumbling temple, then trotted the rest of the way home with the rattled tourists holding on for dear life. Donkey knows the way!
There were adventures in the bus as well. Regina Ratzinger tells us about the man who turned green.
He was a retired teacher from the southern Netherlands, travelling with his wife. They’d spent most of the time nodding off with their cheeks flattened against the window of the bus. Two weeks before they left Holland the man had started taking Imodium, to keep from getting diarrhoea. Every guidebook you came across talked about the country’s poor hygiene, and he didn’t want to run the risk of having his holiday ruined by dysentery. After the bus had been on the road for about a week, dark spots began appearing faintly on his cheeks and around his mouth. He grew restless, started carrying on non-stop monologues and pacing the aisle. The dark spots broke through to the surface, a sort of moss began growing on his face – a fibrous, dark-green mould that turned to powder when he touched it. It had been three weeks since he’d had a bowel movement. The moss soon covered his neck as well and seemed determined, in some primitive, single-celled fashion, to spread right down into his shirt. His fellow travellers were concerned. Nothing to worry about, the teacher said, it would go away at some point, he’d probably just eaten something that didn’t agree with him. By this time he had turned completely green and apathetic, all he did was loll in his seat and let the Aswan Dam and the temples of Abu Simbel pass him by. By the time they had crossed the Eastern Desert and reached the Red Sea the teacher could no longer stand upright. As three men carried him off the bus at Hurghada, his wife flitting nervously around them, all he did was smile benevolently. The fungus had now taken root on his tongue as well, making it look as though he’d been sucking on a green jawbreaker. The other travellers who saw his swollen belly said it looked like the bloated stomach of a drowned man.
At Hurghada’s general hospital they gave him the maximum allowable dose of laxatives: he almost exploded. Three and a half weeks’ worth of food had collected in his stomach and intestines, kilos of half-digested clay had piled up before a port hermetically sealed with Imodium. During the ensuing stampede of old shit, his anus and part of his rectum ripped open. ‘Mr Brouwer has given birth to a golem,’ someone in the group whispered, and they hadn’t laughed so hard in ages.
‘What’s a golem?’ Christof asks, but Regina Ratzinger has already moved on to the next stack of photographs.
Mr Brouwer remained behind in Hurghada while the rest of the group crossed the Sinai to the Gulf of Aqaba. In the village of Nuweiba, the last stop before flying home from Cairo, they stayed at the Domina, a luxury hotel with a swimming pool, a disco and a 130-kilo pianist in the lounge.
In Regina’s photos we see a dark man with a moustache like a guinea pig. His skin is the colour of potting soil. Three pictures later we see him puffing on a water pipe and grinning through the clouds of smoke. A little later he’s standing fully dressed beside Regina in a bikini on the beach.
‘Who’s the moustache?’ Joe asks.
His mother slides the next photo over that one, but this one’s got the moustache in it as well, standing now beside a campfire on the beach, against a dark sky with a few stripes of sunset in it.
‘What’s the moustache grinning about?’ asks Joe, but his mother says nothing.
Joe gets up, Engel and Christof follow him. Regina stares at the photo.
‘You can tell me some other time,’ Joe says. ‘OK?’
After Joe’s father, not many people were buried in the old graveyard along Kruisweg, which runs behind our garden house – my current residence. On nice days, when the windows were open at our place, we always used to hear the funerals. Father Nieuwenhuis’s voice through the loudspeakers, a member of the family coming up to the microphone to read a letter to the dearly departed, and finally the funeral director thanking everyone on behalf of the family and calling their attention to the buffet afterwards at ‘Het Karrewiel’ restaurant: right at the end of the street, the second left and all the way down, parking at the back.
For years I listened to this depressing business. More perhaps than Death itself, Father Nieuwenhuis’s bland little talks made all men equal. No matter who you were, whether you’d climbed the highest mountains, brought twelve children into the world or set up a successful contracting firm, the apostles John, Paul and Nieuwenhuis were the Great Equalizers. The immutable dead earnest tone, the same meaningful silences, the searching gaze sweeping over the heads of the flock – it was almost enough to make you swear off dying altogether.
One Bible text still stands out clearly in my mind, and that’s because of the time of year at which our windows opened for the first time – Easter. Along with the hum of bumblebees and the downy warmth of early spring, it was Nieuwenhuis’s favourite reading that always came through those open windows, from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:
Behold, I show you a mystery;
We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound,
and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.
and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,
and this mortal shall have put on immortality,
then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written,
Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin;
and the strength of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God,
which giveth us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
When the new cemetery opened, the old one behind our house became run-down. It was a gradual decline, in the end the municipal workers only came by for the most crucial of maintenance work. I wondered how long it would take before they dug the whole thing up.
Most people buy burial rights for ten years. That gives you at least ten years of peace and quiet, there where you and eternity meet. After that all you can do is hope they won’t be too stingy to pitch in for another ten years, otherwise you’ll be exhumed. Not that it really matters, but still; hardly a pleasant idea, is it, an eternity that lasts only ten years . . . ?
Then again, how long does your memory still cause others to grieve? Two years? Three? Four or five at most if you’re very well loved, but mourning rarely lasts longer than that. All that comes after is remembrance. Remembrance has its emotional moments, to be sure, but not the raw grief of those first few days and weeks. You begin to wear away, my friend. You’re slowly eroded right out of them. There are moments when they can no longer remember your face, or how you kissed, your smell, the sound of your voice . . . Then it’s pretty much over and done with. And one day someone else comes along and takes your place. That’s a bitter pill, of course, but then you were the one who dropped out of the game, remember?