‘In Nuweiba there was a pelican,’ Mahfouz told me once. ‘Big, white. One day he came out of the water and never went back. Maybe he’d had enough of living at sea and decided that he wanted to live among people. He ate of our meat, our bread and our fish. Tourists came who wanted to have their pictures taken with him. Sometimes we would build a fire at night and he would float close by, so he could keep an eye on us.’
At this point in the story the Arab pulled out a ragged pack of Cleopatras and patted the filter against his left thumbnail. He lit it, then remembered that I was there too. We smoked. Some smokers exhale smoke like it’s coming from a plane, a straight, gray contrail, but I’d never seen anyone smoke the way the Arab did – he smoked, how shall I put it, to vanish. He took a dollop of smoke in his mouth and let it eddy up around his face the way clouds rise to hide a mountaintop from view. Is that the way they smoked where he came from? It was something to see. He seemed to have forgotten what he was saying about the pelican, in any case he’d squatted down again and was watching the boats with his face regularly eclipsed in cloud.
After some time had passed in that way, Mahfouz started talking again, about back when the tourists had avoided his country because of the situation in Israel, and how all of them grew a lot skinnier as they waited for better days.
‘Imagine you are a sailor,’ he said, ‘and suddenly the wind is gone. Your ship just lies there in the middle of the sea and all you can do is pray for wind . . . That’s how it is with the merchant, too; he tightens his belt and looks on high until Allah remembers him. We waited like seeds in the desert for rain, for better times. And our pelican waited too. But we had to eat first. After all, he had the whole sea full of fish, no? But then he stopped waiting until he got something, and started stealing.’
Mahfouz looked at me sternly.
‘Dependency turns you into a thief. He had become an evil old thief. We chased him away but he kept coming back, maybe he had forgotten how to fish. One evening he committed a crime for which Allah punished him. Monsef Adel Aziz was roasting a chicken on the beach, and the pelican tore the chicken from the spit and swallowed it in one gulp. One hour later he was dead.’
Mahfouz ground out the cigarette with his heel and shrugged. I looked at him, baffled. Was that it? I hadn’t been expecting such an abrupt and fateful ending. But Mahfouz himself seemed to think it was pretty nifty, he looked at me as though awaiting my approval. He could keep waiting. I thought the story sucked.
It was in that same week that I saw Joe worried for the first time.
‘She took his passport,’ he said. ‘The crazy bitch.’
I raised my eyebrows in a query.
‘My mother. She’s hidden Mahfouz’s passport. She’s afraid he’s going to run away or something.’
Regina was going to great lengths not to lose her Arab.
‘She hid his fancy suit too. She thinks he attracts too much attention. From women.’
I’d already noticed that Mahfouz was looking a bit less natty lately. The people on the ferry no longer stared in amazement when he collected fares for Piet; an ebony Arab with a fragrant moustache and a linen suit tearing their tickets – that was something worth seeing!
Now that love had pitched its tent at his home, Joe was not at all pleased with the way things were going. India interpreted the events for him; he himself was still less than sensitive to the myriad possibilities of love.
‘You mean it’s sort of like your tastebuds?’ he asked India. ‘Sweet at the tip of your tongue, sour halfway and bitter all the way at the back? Is that what you’re saying, that love is sweet at first but gets more and more bitter the more she loves him?’
Even though the perception of saltiness was missing from his simile, I found the comparison rather apt: infatuation as the gateway to gullet and intestinal tract. It squared with what I’d read about it, and with things I’d noticed with my own parents. And somehow I couldn’t stop thinking about that ridiculous story about the pelican and the roast chicken.
As the grass smouldered in the fields and the sheep were rushed to the slaughterhouse with heat exhaustion because the farmers were too lazy to plant them a shade tree, I learned to drink. It’s the only thing Dirk ever taught me, oceanic drinking, drinking for as long as it takes to strip you of all dignity and make you a beast among beasts, braying for love and attention and too filthy to handle.
How does something like that get started?
You pass by the Sun Café and your eldest brother comes outside, because he saw you rolling by. You’re surprised that he’s even allowed in there, because they banned him, didn’t they? Whatever the case, Dirk’s already had a few and his mood is treacherously buoyant. He shouts, ‘You look a little hot under the collar, Frankie, come on in!’, and before you know it he’s pushed you into the Sun and shouted, ‘A beer for me and one for my little brother, Albert.’
Albert is the man behind the bar, otherwise it’s all men whose faces you know but whose names you’ve forgotten. What the hell are you doing here?
‘Stop looking like you’re going to bite someone, Frankie!’
Dirk is dangerously jovial and, to your deep disgust, has now referred to you as ‘my little brother’ for the first time in your life. The worst of it is, you know exactly why: today you’re his circus animal, he’s going to profit from your existence at last by having you drink your first beer in front of everyone and then laughing along with them as the beer runs down your chin and into your shirt. He’s getting the laughs and I’m getting the pity, but no one protests because ‘it’s his big brother, he knows what he’s doing’, and there’s the next beer already, and why not: if you want me to drink, you chump, then I’ll drink till that rotten smirk is wiped off your face, because this isn’t what you had in mind, having me change from your trained sea lion into your shame and fury, because you can’t keep anything under control without rage and bullying . . . All right, Albert, my throat’s dry as dust and my brother’s footing the bill . . . and if I take a bite out of your glasses it’s only because I’m spastic as all get out, but hey, the way I spit out the glass in a glistening stream of slivers and blood, that’s pretty nifty, isn’t it, guys?
That’s how something like that gets started.
And how far do you have to go to be purged of their pity? Not very far. I drank till I fell on my face, lowing like a cow, and they lifted me back into my cart and bought me no more beer. By that time Dirk was already so pissed off that he would have whacked me one if it hadn’t been so unseemly to punch a cripple in public.
What surprised me most was how much noise I made. They thought that was funny at first. The alcohol kindled a fire under my usual soundlessness. It was as though my gullet ripped open, oxygen swirled around and I screamed, man, I screamed. It had been a couple of years since Dirk had heard me make a sound, he couldn’t believe his ears. Once the novelty had worn off, the men just grimaced a bit uneasily as I blasted my foghorn.
‘That’ll be enough of that,’ the barman said.
Dirk yanked on my arm. He could fuck off. The men turned back to the bar, one of them said, ‘They’re all the same, the lot of them.’ And although Dirk knew exactly what he was referring to, he was glad to be able to turn his attention to something else.
‘So what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ the man said without turning around.
‘That we’re all the same.’
The man looked at him as though he smelled something foul. This was Dirk in due form, this was what he was known for. I saw the iron descend into his body and the rage darken his eyes; this was the Dirk I knew: old Dirk If-you-can’t-pound-the-shit-out-of-it-then-try-fucking-it Hermans.
‘What’s eating you, asshole?’ the man said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Dirk said. ‘You dirty piece of shit.’
And before I knew what was happening Dirk had slammed the man’s forehead down on the bar. Blood spattered from his w
rinkles. The man came off his stool with a roar and threw himself on my brother, but got such a hard thump that the glasswork tinkled on the shelf. The others jumped up, apparently compelled somehow to act as a unit in the event of an attack from outside, and now Dirk had five on him instead of only one. But, like I said before, he couldn’t count past three anyway. The bastard went down like a drowning man. Two of them dragged him toward the door and the others kicked and punched him so hard that they hurt themselves. They ignored me. When I saw that crowd of mechanics and masons piling onto Dirk, for whom I’d never felt one millisecond of sympathy, let alone brotherly love, something weird happened: I got angry. Almost too angry to breathe. Raging inside me was something you might call ‘the cry of blood’, in any case something I’d never counted on. Reeling under this new sensation, I threw off the brakes and rammed my cart as hard as I could into the scrimmage.
I smashed into a guy who had his back turned to me as he whacked away at Dirk. My cart hit him behind the knees, buckling his legs forward and throwing his upper body back so that I could grab him by the throat with the only weapon I had: my hand. It found his windpipe and squeezed. His arms flailed but found no purchase. The hand squeezed harder, the fingers sinking into flesh. I felt muscles contracting in mortal fear, and the wild pounding of blood. I remember pleasure and the need to kill him. It was going to be easy. Just don’t let go and squeeze harder, that was all. Tear out his gullet. My fingers were tingling. The others let Dirk go and started in on me, they yanked on my arm with that purple head and lolling tongue attached to the end of it, and punched me in the head without mercy. Amid the rain of blows I saw the face growing darker all the time. Oh God please let me murder him—
That’s all I remember.
Only that face, which I remember as being black. And after that day, there were two things I knew:
1. that the man I had wanted to kill was a roofer by the name of Clemens Mulder, and that he would never be my friend;
2. that I had found a new love, namely the release of alcohol, and would be true to it for the rest of my days.
It’s like a chain of little spiders,’ was India’s comment when she saw the stitches on my eyebrow.
She brought me to the garage behind the house, where Joe was jabbing at his arm with a needle.
‘Joe, what are you doing?!’ India said.
Along the length of his left forearm he had tattooed the letters of his own name: JOE – still bloody, but a clear aquamarine beneath. It was August, the dog days had us all in their grip.
‘What’s up, Frankie, been in a fight?’ Joe asked.
All you had to do was look at me: both eyes blackened with old blood, six stitches across my brow. Joe never got into fights, things like that didn’t happen to him. I realized that I’d crossed the line into the bastards’ domain, joined the ranks of the murderous and, what’s worse, of a family in which the boys started swinging their fists as soon as they came of age. (The Hermans have no girls; ours is a bloodline of gnarls and knots, not of soft things.)
I, who had vowed never to become like them, had plunged headfirst into the first brawl that came my way. If no one had stopped me I would have strangled that roofer. I had fallen, and Joe could tell. He didn’t say much that day, just sat there jabbing more ink into his arm. His jaw muscles pulsed each time the needle pierced his skin.
I left after a while and didn’t see him for a couple of weeks.
In the days that followed I worked on my diaries more than ever, going back to do some necessary checks and amendments.
My thoughts went back to the years before I’d met Joe, before I’d left the world behind for 220 days. So many questions back then. So many that it made me dizzy. There had to be more to it than this, I was sure of it: people couldn’t really be content to live and die the way they did. Some secret was being kept from me, some thing they knew but weren’t telling, something a thousand times more real than this. Wondering why, they say, is the start of all philosophy. For me it was the start of a kind of hell.
‘No whys about it,’ Pa would say. ‘That’s just the way it is.’
And when I kept asking he would smack me up against the side of the head. He was the wrong person to ask, in other words, but that didn’t mean there was no answer; I wasn’t too ignorant to know ignorance when I saw it. So I waited. Somewhere a door would open, someone would explain how it went, and until then I would keep my eyes wide open and keep asking why.
People, I knew, liked to think of life as a stairway. You started at the bottom and kept climbing as life went on. Nursery school, kindergarten and then primary school, where they told you that ‘higher education’ was the answer. That’s where you’d find out about the things you couldn’t see from here.
I believed them. But I was consumed by impatience, so I went on asking why until it started getting really irritating. In their eyes I was just being cheeky, overplaying my hand. As though I was asking to speak to God himself.
I wouldn’t want to pretend that I, with all those questions of mine, was the kind of kid you’d have found endearing. More like autistic. Back then my thinking had an aggravating severity to it that I’ve never even approached since. The same kind of barebones austerity I later came to admire in the philosophy of the samurai.
And the answer didn’t come. I’d expected a lot from high school. Biology, history, literature . . . that’s where it was going to happen. It had to be buried somewhere inside that pile of books I lugged around each day.
But the books spoke with the voices of teachers, or the teachers spoke with the voices of books: how that worked was never quite clear to me. They taught me skills, but provided no answers.
Until then, my ‘why’ had always been referred on. But this, for the time being, was where the buck stopped, this was where I was going to stay for the next five years; these same mouths would speak to me the whole time and, to my horror and dismay, I discovered that my question wasn’t particularly popular here either. Things were what they were, and it didn’t do to go poking around in it too much – just like Pa said.
I caught a glimmer of an abysmal truth. The people here wanted to pass the time as comfortably as possible, without having to deal with questions that couldn’t be answered with a simple ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘I don’t know’. No one around me was doing anything except the best imitation they could of what they’d seen other people do before. Parents imitated their parents, kindergarten teachers other kindergarten teachers, pupils other pupils, and clergymen and educators each other and their books. The only variation was in what they forgot to imitate.
None of them knew the way, rank amateurism was all it was. And I lay awake at night, my eyes wide open, more afraid of the things that weren’t there than of the things that were.
Some people say they were born in the wrong body; I, however, was born not only in the wrong body but also in the wrong family in the wrong village in the wrong country and so on. I read a lot, and in those books I thought I sometimes perceived a shimmer of light. I devoured every book in the Lomark library, except for the large-print section. When I discovered the samurai, I was impressed by their Spartan self-discipline. They at least saw the need, when you had lost your honour and life was rendered meaningless, to stick a knife in your own belly. Seppuku: the clean, straight cut you could never practice, because the first time was also the last. More people should give it a go.
At church I sat in the back pew playing cards, while up in front Nieuwenhuis was saying ‘He that searches for the truth comes to the light,’ but I still couldn’t see a thing.
Nieuwenhuis’s conviction was born of the need to be convinced, that much was clear to me. But exactly what he was convinced of was less clear. Repression was the only thing that could have kept that trap spring-loaded for two thousand years. But now that the internal combustion engine and social democracy had taken some of the tension out of it, you saw repression making way for tolerance and guitars in the church. It was like the wa
y old people who had been real bastards all their life would suddenly break down and weep over nothing when their number was almost up.
Looking back on it, I think I wasn’t even searching for the truth or anything, just for something that shed a little light.
My first year of high school was one huge disaster. It made me sick. Everywhere I looked I saw mediocrity and submissiveness. And an innocence that ruined everything, because it meant no one could really help it. If we were, in fact, the measure of all things, what hope was there of redemption?
By the end of my second year I was furious. A long vacation followed, and I watched July go by. Then August came, and I waited for nothing. I lay on my back in the tall grass that was already turning yellow. The dryness rustled, little bugs crawled over my arms and legs. I let them. Somewhere I heard the pounding of a galloping horse, the corn was still half high and the rust-brown sorrel stuck out above it. I looked up at the blank sky. A lovely blue and all, but otherwise nothing. Growling monotonously, a little plane crossed the void.
At the edges of my vision the woolly thistles were bursting their buds, butterflies fluttered aimlessly and I had the feeling I was sinking. I sank to a dark and quiet place.
It was a day for cyclomowers.
I must have heard it, the tractor pulling the snapping blades, cutting through grass and flowers. Whack whack whack. No sleep so deep but that you would hear that. Who could fail to hear the roar of a 190-horsepower John Deere? Who would lie down and sleep in the grass at mowing time? Who would do something like that? Then you’ve got only yourself to blame.
Joe Speedboat Page 9